Gristle King - A Guide to DePIN

What Does PoCv11 Mean For Me?

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by

Nik
in

Short ver­sion: Use a low gain anten­na, report your loca­tion and anten­na gain accu­rate­ly. If you’re in the US, this isn’t a big deal, as our radios pump out enough pow­er to get excel­lent range even with a low gain anten­na. If you’re in a region (UK, EU, etc) where your radio out­put is low, PoCv11 will prob­a­bly decrease your range significantly.

Updated Deep Dive over here.

Want to read on for pos­ter­i­ty? Cool!

PoCv11 is designed to help the Net­work more accu­rate­ly assess loca­tion from radio fre­quen­cy strength sig­nals and to keep Hotspots in RF reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance. It cleans up a few mis­takes Heli­um made ear­ly on in try­ing to assess radio sig­nal strength in an attempt to com­bat gaming.

That’s it. If you are accu­rate­ly report­ing your anten­na gain and your loca­tion, there’s no penal­ty and noth­ing else you need to do.

Nor­mal­ly I love to explain com­pli­cat­ed things, but this one is so damn sim­ple it’s hard to do bet­ter than Amir Haleem, CEO at Helium:

i’ll try and sum­ma­rize what PoC V11 does:

adds region­al sup­port for PoC — today the net­work treats all PoC activ­i­ty as if it’s oper­at­ing in the US. this is a prob­lem as dif­fer­ent regions run on dif­fer­ent radio fre­quen­cies and at dif­fer­ent pow­er lev­els (by law), so what is con­sid­ered valid or invalid varies sub­stan­tial­ly. V11 adds region­al aware­ness based on the assert­ed loca­tion of the Hotspot

removes SNR from the valid­i­ty checks — today both the sig­nal-to-noise ratio and free space path loss cal­cu­la­tion (FSPL) is used to deter­mine whether PoC pack­ets are valid or not. this was an attempt to make it more dif­fi­cult for gamers to lie about their loca­tion. it has­n’t worked well and is being removed. SNR proved to be fair­ly use­less as a mech­a­nism, so now only an FSPL cal­cu­la­tion is used to deter­mine whether Hotspots are where they say they are in rela­tion to each other

adds a region­al fre­quen­cy check — V11 intro­duces a check to make sure that PoC pack­ets are being sent at the cor­rect fre­quen­cy for the region the Hotspots are locat­ed in. for exam­ple if a Hotspot is trans­mit­ting pack­ets in the US fre­quen­cy bands but based in South Korea, those pack­ets would now be invalid

com­plies with local pow­er out­put reg­u­la­tions — dif­fer­ent regions have dif­fer­ent max­i­mum pow­er out­put laws for unli­censed radios. in the US, for exam­ple, the max EIRP is 36dBm. in the EU this is 16.5dBm. cur­rent­ly in PoC v10 the pow­er out­put is hard­cod­ed to 27dBm for the US and rest of the world, and 14dBm for the EU. V11 will reduce the pow­er out­put if the com­bi­na­tion of the max­i­mum out­put pow­er + anten­na gain exceeds the local laws — for exam­ple, a Hotspot oper­at­ing in the US with a 5.8dBi anten­na would have a total EIRP of the Hotspot pow­er out­put (27dBm) + the 5.8dBi anten­na = 32.8dBm total EIRP, which is below the 36dBm allowed. noth­ing would change in this case. if instead the anten­na was changed to a 10dBi anten­na bring­ing the total EIRP to 27dBm + 10dBi = 37dBm, the min­er soft­ware will reduce the pow­er out­put of the Hotspot by 1dBm so that the total is less than equal to the 36dBm allowed by law. in the EU a 5.8dBi anten­na would cause the Hotspot pow­er out­put to be reduced to 10.7dBm so that the total EIRP is 16.5dBm

PoC V11 does not have any­thing to do with the 10 wit­ness max­i­mum, or the wit­ness ran­dom­iza­tion changes that were added recent­ly. we’re hop­ing to acti­vate PoC V11 in ear­ly Octo­ber. it is cur­rent­ly not active.

But, but, but, it COSTS MONEY to state my anten­na gain! Relax, dawg. It costs 55,000 DC. That sounds like a lot. It’s not. 

1 DC = $. 00001. So, 55,000 x .00001 = $.55. You can afford that.

I know you want to get all worked up about PoCv11 and how it will change things. Relax, it’s not a big deal as long as you’re play­ing by the rules. It’s part of Heli­um’s efforts to improve the net­work. Col­or with­in the lines (report your loca­tion, anten­na gain, and ele­va­tion accu­rate­ly) and PoCv11 will only make things better.

Comments

64 responses to “What Does PoCv11 Mean For Me?”

  1. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    That’s a rea­son­able assump­tion, though I bet peo­ple will be dri­ven more by earn­ings than invalid warnings. 😉

  2. Drei Avatar
    Drei

    In the UK and I just got my min­ers. Look­ing around me the reward has dropped dras­ti­cal­ly. I also have 2 bob­cats which I may not get to use.

    Is there any point get­ting any bet­ter anten­nas? I was think­ing to use a 12dbi inside the loft and anoth­er 4 to 6 dbi out­side mount­ed on the chim­ney, this would be with 2 dif­fer­ent hotspots, or maybe one in the back gar­den, but won’t be doing much for dis­tance, maybe 50 meters max.

    Or just stick to 1 hotspot. if so which way? In the loft with a stronger anten­na and remov­ing around 5dbi from it? Or the exter­nal one of 6dbi or 4dbi and report­ing it like you sug­gest­ed at ‑1.4dbi.

  3. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    One hotspot per loca­tion is best prac­tice. Exter­nal anten­nas almost always out­per­form ones indoors. Remem­ber to report the EIRP, not actu­al cable loss. So, ANTENNA GAIN minus CABLE LOSS is what you enter into the app.

    If you had a 6 dBi anten­na with 1.2 dB of cable loss, you’d report an anten­na with a 4.8 gain. Does that make sense?

  4. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Hi Nik,
    Thank you for all your great sup­port to the Heli­um community!
    I think I read some­where that you used to like patch/directional anten­na but not after the inro­duc­tion of PoCv11. Is that true and if so why is that?

    Thanks a lot!
    Patrick

  5. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Actu­al­ly, the oth­er way around. Pri­or to PoCv11 they were very dif­fi­cult to get to work well because you had to off­set the gain. With PoCv11 in place you no longer get penal­ized by the addi­tion­al gain. Still, you’re almost always bet­ter off with an omni any­way, so there’s not a huge point in using directionals.

  6. Jacobus Avatar
    Jacobus

    As far as TRANSMITTING is concerned:
    In Dutch reg­u­la­tions I see 25 mW ERP which is 14 dBm ERP, which cor­re­sponds to 16.15 (not 16.5) dBm EIRP.
    EU CE cer­tifi­cate for Bob­cat min­er 300 2 GB EU ver­sion says LoRa RF pow­er is 9.90 dBm ERP.
    So I would argue 14 — 9.90 = 4.1 dBm is the max­i­mum nett anten­na gain, includ­ing loss­es caused by cable, con­nec­tors and light­ning arrestor, if I dont want my TX pow­er to be reduced by PoCv11.

    As for RECEIVING:
    For RX a high gain could still be inter­est­ing, right? If the major­i­ty of your earn­ings come from wit­ness­ing (and not from bea­con­ing) than you might con­sid­er using a high­er anten­na gain and accept­ing the pos­si­ble reduc­tion of bea­con­ing, as long as you max­i­mize your earn­ings by wit­ness­ing more oth­er hotspots.

    And then of course there will be peo­ple spec­i­fy­ing low­er anten­na gain then they use in real­i­ty, as long as they don’t get invalid wit­ness­es. To have “best of both TX and RX worlds”.

    Since I try to real­ly clear this up for myself, I was curi­ous where you found the 16.5 dBm EIRP for Europe.

    Thanks!

  7. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Jacobus
    Great ques­tion & obser­va­tion, sounds like you know about this than I do. 🙂

    I’ll have to dig around for the 16.5 num­ber, that came from Amir Haleem’s quote. I found the EIRP on page 27 of the LoRa-Alliance LoRaWAN Region­al Para­me­ters doc­u­ment. “By default, the Max EIRP is con­sid­ered to be +16 dBm”. 

    If you find any­thing else I can improve, please let me know. Thanks for bring­ing this up!

  8. John Avatar
    John

    Hel­lo Nik!

    Quick ques­tion or your opin­ion: if our cur­rent HEX is already occu­pied will it be worth it to place (on the app not actu­al­ly) the min­er on the next HEX which is emp­ty!? The dis­tance is 250m from the actu­al location..
    Thanks in advance 🙂

  9. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi John,
    The offi­cial line is that you should assert the loca­tion where it is. My take is that mis-assert­ing your Hotspot is fine with­in, say, 150 meters for pri­va­cy rea­sons. You can cer­tain­ly test it out beyond that. Make sure you’re check­ing all res and not just 8.

  10. Hey Avatar
    Hey

    Hey, for exam­ple if I have 7.5 anten­na and my tot­tal los brings me to 5.8 dbi, should I add 5.8 into appli­ca­tion or put 3dbi in order to avoid lim­it­ing my pow­er out­put? I live in EU.

  11. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    If you put it low­er than it is you may end up broad­cast­ing out­side of legal lim­its. I’d just keep it accu­rate and use your cal­cu­lat­ed 5.8.

  12. Ben Avatar
    Ben

    Hi Nik, I am in the U.K. and installing a 6dbi mcGill opti­mised anten­na with 32 feet of lmr600. Should I input it at 5 because I know there is some loss with 32 feet of cable. I am now think­ing the LMR600 was a bad invest­ment due to new POC rules and I should have stuck to the RG58. 

    Do you know the DBI out­put of the EU Bob­cat 300 miner?

  13. Ben Avatar
    Ben

    Hi Nik,

    I have been doing some research and I don’t think the 16.5DBM for the EU is cor­rect. Every­thing I have read it’s com­ing back at 20DBM? Can you con­firm, maybe it’s recent­ly changed in 2022. 

    If I google what is the eirp lim­it Europe, I get a glob­al list, even if I search for U.K. all comes back at 20DBM can you con­firm your findings.
    Thanks
    Ben

  14. omarov Avatar
    omarov

    hi man.

    how could I know what the best (RX/ TX DBI) is accord­ing to my instal­la­tion.. any cal­cu­la­tions or advise

    anten­na 10dbi . lmr400 30 meter
    anten­na 10 dbi. lmr400 5meters
    anten­na 8,5 dbi. lmr400 20 meters.

    and spe­cif­ic cal­cu­la­tion can assume what should I adjust my flarm booster„,»>???
    thank you

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