tl;dr: Your phone doesn't have radios capable of talking on bands like 10.7–12.7 GHz (X/Ku band) and 37.5–42.5 GHz (Ka/V band)

Getting Starlink Dishy to around $2,000, and I understand it's closer to $1,000 by now, is an incredible engineering achievement. SpaceX didn't accomplish that by overengineering the shit out of it.

I do not doubt that now that this problem has cropped up SpaceX will address it. If they don't, if in a couple of years this is still a problem with the system in full operation, then criticism would be justified.

https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/starlink-dish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne,_California

Edit: after looking at a teardown I suppose it's because there are ~3000 channels. Woof.

Cheap brute force hack: Have a chip burn power to heat the chip up to a constant temperature. This was done in one of the early precision band-gap references.

More expensive brute force hack: Stick a Peltier cooler on the thing, and servo to a well-controlled temperature.

Communication equipment is critical to work for emergency use, and coincidentally, emergency use is when you're most likely to see high temperatures.

tl;dr: Military equipment is required to operate like this, and has insanely high-performance RF equipment.

These are CPEs and they're sold at a tremendous loss already (a quick google says a whopping $2500 loss on a $500 price tag!). They won't stay in business long if they burn an extra $500 per device to make it suitable for a couple thousand extra customers.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea, but it’s probably not going to be a kill the company expense.

Starlink, is like Tesla a decade ago. This is their roadster.

Will I get it, yes. Will I complain about early adpotee stuff, yes.

Is my life better just having it along? 1000% yes.

AZ is currently the hottest place in the world at the moment. Not the upper range. The hottest place.

https://www.wx-now.com/Weather/WxExtremes?hottest=true

An aside, I was dating a woman from The North. She came here and we were travelling around the State. We stopped in Venice at a restaurant, I wasn't paying attention, and she just hopped out of the car barefoot! Only did that once, though.

And you have to keep in mind the temperature is measured in particular ways, local temps near dark surfaces can get significantly higher.

Just because it doesn’t work in your environment doesn’t mean that it’s not suitable elsewhere and the burden of spec changes for your climate may make the cost go up for people elsewhere who don’t have the same requirements

It's not reasonable for Starlink?

$500 seems cheap for what it does, and that makes sense if it’s cost optimized but doesn’t have the broadest climate zone tolerance.

/s

I'm confused by your statement, anyway. Are you saying things shouldn't be designed to handle every environment they might reasonably encounter?

There is a substantial portion of the worlds population that lives months at a time where temperatures are regularly well below freezing.

As a result, that temperature being “effing cold” is something US Americans and Canadians readily agree on.

In he summer, I don’t leave my phone in direct sunlight for extended periods or else it will overheat. Simply placing it in the shade or in a pocket prevents this. It usually only hits 100 here, so I don’t have experience with the 100-120F range and overheating.

Tl;dr Prevent your phone from reaching extreme temperatures and it will work fine.

It’s just battery chemistry, current capacity and voltage are depressed by low temps.

Some phones aren’t engineered very well and regularly pull current near their battery’s capacity which is just poor design.

It's possible that the phone generated enough heat to stay warmer though. The main problem with operating it was actually how cold my hand that's holding the phone gets since it doesn't move like the other hand does. I had to wear double gloves.

(And no, most phones will not operate at that temperature for longer than a few minutes)

I don't think it is a simple as saying that. If, for example, it cost twice as much to design something that works up to 140 as it does to make it work up to 122, I don't think it makes sense to make everyone in the world pay twice as much for something they don't need.

You should sell a more expensive version that works up to 140.

I think it is a design decision, and the costs and benefits have to be weighed. If the extra cost per unit is more than the lost revenue from not being able to sell to consumers in hight temperature locations, it might make sense not to design it for high temperatures.

As long as these limitations are communicated to potential customers, I don’t see a problem with that.

You're driving what is essentially a greenhouse, I don't want to pay extra for a cooling system that's designed for temperatures up to 150 degrees. Though also I wouldn't pay 6 figures for a car.

What's repulsive is the way many people live in AZ.

Literal hot take: maybe people living in one of the hottest places on Earth shouldn't expect to have the same consumer experience (without modulating their habits). IMHO, AZ is chock full of human hubris. Pools, fountains, water features, grass lawns, and golf courses.

Why should people expect to live as if it were Cascadia or New England with water consumption? Same with car performance. Maybe you don't get to have an icy 68°F in your rolling greenhouse behind a 40,000BTU power plant at dead noon in the heckin desert.

Contrast living in an adobe house/masonry house with no AC, taking a siesta/riposa in the hottest hours, and tolerating a bit of sweat, vs in-ground pool, AC set to 68, driving around mid-day in a rolling greenhouse.

122F is not a normal temperature.

If anything, you should fully expect, at this point, that how we deal with extreme conditions in Phoenix is a harbinger of what is to come for other parts of the nation.

But that's still less than half a percent of the US population.

It doesn't make sense to live where you can freeze to death or don't have access to water, either, does it? Except those two scenarios include most Americans. Without modern infrastructure, it hardly makes sense to live anywhere.

If it makes economic sense, I'm sure they'll fix it or someone else will do it better eventually. If not, maybe the municipal governments can subsidize something that works there?

Just say Tesla dropped the ball on this engineering prototype and V2 will work on the sun.

People should almost certainly get over grass lawns, I know there is going to be huge problems with water, but afiact Phoenix recycles a huge proportion of their greywater, and this is a perfect use case for solar, molten salt, nuclear.

Hard to farm, I guess. Isn't there gold to mine too?

Before reading this thread I didn't...