Starlink dishes enter 'thermal shutdown' once temps hit 122F

We've seen how SpaceX's Starlink satellite dish continues to work in super-cold ice-covered environments, but what about the heat? 122F+ and the satellite dish goes into thermal shutdown.

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A post on Reddit is now providing some updates on the upper limits of what the Starlink satellite dish can handle thermally, where in hot environments the dish can hit 122F and it'll go into thermal shutdown. One of Starlink's customers in Arizona saw his satellite dish go into thermal shutdown when temperatures popped over 122F in Arizona recently.

Another user shared their experience about hot temperatures in Las Vegas, Nevada yesterday where they hit 111F -- but his Starlink internet service was fine. His terminal didn't shut down, and no service outages were reported -- this is a better result than SpaceX said last year.

SpaceX engineers explained in 2020 that the Starlink user terminal will remain operational in temperatures down into the -30C (-22F) through to as high as 40C (104F) but these new runs are in Nevada and Arizona, with temps of 111F and 122F. The user in Arizona had to call SpaceX support after his dish thermally shutdown at 144F.

The company has new satellite terminals pending authorization from the FCC, with the tweaked terminals better handling hotter environments. The current-gen terminals have higher transmitting power, with the new terminals lowering that -- lowered power = lower heat, which should have the tweaked dishes possibly surviving hotter environments without thermally shutting down.