That's weird.

The company I'm working for has its own EMC chamber (maintaining that huge room fully calibrated and standardized is ultra expensive... just looking at these EMC test receivers that go up to 40GHz my me cry in $$$$) and we invested giant engineering effort into our products to be far below every radiation limit norm in the world.

Shouldn't satellite companies have even better stuff and more strict regulations or are these unintended effects maybe caused by the harsh environment?

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inemesitaffia 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

They did. These are sub 1 Ghz bands and the issue is from the engines and (maybe power supply)

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parsimo2010 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most communications satellites (which is all Starlink really is) are heavily focused on their operating bands and any specific bands they are told not to interfere with so they can get launch approval. There's no benefit to doing anything extra. And not only do they have to be told which specific bands they can't interfere with, the government actually has to require delivery of test results or else that is the same as giving permission to interfere.

Most companies won't spend a penny, take a second of time, or add a gram to a satellite if it doesn't affect their mission or chance of approval. Especially not one as cost-optimized as SpaceX. They won't change a thing unless the US government forces them to do so, or if they think that a government order is imminent so they come to some voluntary agreement ahead of time to avoid what would probably be a more constraining official regulation in the future.

The actual issue is probably caused by switch-mode power supplies or some digital signal on the satellite that isn't fully shielded, possibly one that does digital control of a motor or thruster. It probably isn't the communication radios since they operate at a much higher frequency. You can fix the issue by adding filtering and/or shielding, but that takes extra components (meaning extra cost and weight) and requires testing (meaning time). Plus you have to identify the offending system, which means you have to start with testing and detective work. This interference was only detected on some Starlink satellites, so you have to do detective work to find out if it is a particular operating mode or generation of satellite that is offending, do testing to confirm it, and then work on a fix.

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nn3 2 days ago | parent [-]

This is actually not correct for Starlink. They did a lot of work to lower their albedo based on astronomer complaints, even though there wasn't any government regulation in this area.

It might apply to some of the emerging Starlink competitors however, especially the Chinese ones and AST.

	▲	parsimo2010 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The albedo reduction they worked on is the exact reason why I wrote this, "...or if they think that a government order is imminent so they come to some voluntary agreement ahead of time." SpaceX only "voluntarily" did that because the government was likely to put more stringent requirements on them if they ignored the complaints.

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financetechbro 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m certain that SpaceX does not care about regulations