Gristle King - A Guide to DePIN

A Rough Guide To Helium Hotspot Placement

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by

Nik
in ,

This was writ­ten in late 2020/early 2020 for folks curi­ous about opti­miz­ing a Heli­um Hotspot place­ment. Some state­ments are out of date, though the meat of it all is gen­er­al­ly correct.

Most start with their anten­na, which is (almost com­plete­ly) the wrong approach for max­i­miz­ing earn­ings. The only way you could make a less effi­cient improve­ment at the start is to focus on what cables to buy. 

There are four fun­da­men­tal aspects of an opti­mal Heli­um hotspot place­ment; anten­nas and cables are at the bot­tom of the list for importance.

Before we get there (relax, it’s only a few para­graphs away), let’s get a few impor­tant points out of the way:

First, while I think every­one read­ing this should buy at least one hotspot and place it as opti­mal­ly as you can, over the long run you’ll earn far more by fig­ur­ing out a way to actu­al­ly use the net­work and not just pro­vide coverage.

Sec­ond, if you fol­low and read through every link in this arti­cle you’ll be ready to make excel­lent deci­sions about the best pos­si­ble hotspot place­ment. The whole thing (Heli­um, anten­nas, opti­mum hotspot place­ment) will take about an hour to digest and understand. 

Third, if you don’t want or have the time to fig­ure out Heli­um on your own, for a long time I offered both cours­es and consulting. 

ASSUMPTIONS

  1. You know that Heli­um is a net­work of Hotspots that trans­mit and receive radio sig­nals, then pass those sig­nals onto the inter­net. In gen­er­al, the more sig­nals a giv­en hotspot receives, the more HNT it earns. When this was writ­ten, Heli­um was on its own chain. It’s now on Solana. Hotspots record trans­ac­tions on a blockchain and reward own­ers for pro­vid­ing cov­er­age with HNT, a cryp­tocur­ren­cy token.
  2. You have, or have ordered, or are think­ing about order­ing, a Heli­um hotspot.
  3. You haven’t read every last post and thread on the inter­net about max­i­miz­ing a hotspot placement. 🙂

There are only a few things that real­ly mat­ter when it comes to your hotspot place­ment. Some of them will change over time, some of them are fun­da­men­tal. All are dri­ven by just one goal over the long term: 

ADD VALUE TO THE NETWORK

FUNDAMENTALS FOR OPTIMUM PLACEMENT

In order of importance: 

  • HOTSPOT DENSITY
  • ANTENNA “VIEW”
  • APPROPRIATE ANTENNA
  • MINIMIZED & HIGH QUALITY CONNECTION LENGTH/CABLES

HOTSPOT DENSITY: Opti­mum den­si­ty is deter­mined using Uber’s H3 map. At the low end, hotspots won’t earn from oth­er hotspots less than 300 meters away. At the high end, hotspots can “wit­ness” oth­er hotspots 50 km out.

Back to the Uber map. The map uses (most­ly) hexa­gons to form grids of dif­fer­ent sizes. Each size is called a “res­o­lu­tion” or “res” for short. Each hex size has an appro­pri­ate den­si­ty for its resolution.

Here is a dat­ed inter­ac­tive map (it stopped being updat­ed in late fall of 2020) of den­si­ty and hotspot place­ments. It’s col­or cod­ed and fair­ly intu­itive. Green means good den­si­ty, red indi­cates too dense. Here’s a quick screenshot:

At each “res” there is an opti­mal num­ber of hotspots per hexa­gon. That num­ber can change. It is deter­mined by a base rate of hotspots per hex plus the num­ber of hotspots in sur­round­ing hex­es. Go ahead, read that sen­tence again a few times. The details are in HIP 17, look for “Pro­posed Chain Variables.”

Yes, it’s a bit com­pli­cat­ed. It was made this way in order to pro­gram­mat­i­cal­ly account for den­si­ty dif­fer­ences between cities, sub­urbs, and rur­al areas.

Here’s a screen­shot map of San Fran­cis­co (pulled from the HIP 17 Visu­al­iz­er) to give anoth­er perspective.

Screenshot of San Francisco using the HIP17 visualizer.

Notice the green hotspots don’t have oth­er hotspot as close to them as the orange and red ones. Red is the worst; they’re basi­cal­ly on top of each oth­er and pro­vid­ing dupli­cate (or trip­li­cate or worse) cov­er­age, which isn’t use­ful to the network.

If you want to know if your loca­tion will be good, you’ll need to study HIP17.

If you read HIP17 until you under­stand it, you’ll be in the 1% of Heli­um Hotspot own­ers who don’t real­ly have ques­tions about opti­mum density. 

It looks com­pli­cat­ed at first, but it’s actu­al­ly straight­for­ward. If you’ve ever read about Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, you’ll have an under­stand­ing of hotspot den­si­ty: Not too dense, not dense enough, but just right.

If you need to visu­al­ize things, use Heli­umVi­sion or Hotspot­ty. Use the options for hex over­lays in Heli­umVi­sion or just zoom in and out on your Hotspot with Hotspot­ty. If you need help with Heli­umVi­sion, con­sid­er tak­ing my Heli­umVi­sion Mas­ter Class.

If you don’t have the time or just want to skip that part, you can hire me and I’ll help you pick the best option for your area and circumstance. 

BOTTOM LINE: You need to have opti­mum den­si­ty for max­i­mum earnings.

ANTENNA VIEW: Before you go order­ing the lat­est and great­est super-hot anten­na (more on that lat­er), make sure your anten­na has a view. A “view” has three impor­tant aspects.

  • Out­side. Walls and even win­dows will block radio waves.
  • High above oth­er obstacles.
  • Clear view to as much as possible.

The view of your anten­na is far more impor­tant than upgrad­ing your anten­na. A high­er ele­va­tion “stock” anten­na (the one that comes with your hotspot) will out­per­form a super fan­cy anten­na that’s low down EVERY TIME. You can see the line of sight of your anten­na to spe­cif­ic spots using RF Line of Sight or Helium.Vision.

Get as high as rea­son­ably pos­si­ble. How high? From the Amer­i­can Radio Relay League’s doc­u­ment on anten­na placement:

“To a dis­tant receiv­ing sta­tion, a trans­mit­ting anten­na at 120 feet will pro­vide the effect of approx­i­mate­ly 8 to 10 times more trans­mit­ting pow­er than the same anten­na at 35 feet.”

You may be think­ing, “I’ll nev­er get my anten­na 120′ high.” That’s OK, do the best you can, but know that until you get it high, you’ll be miss­ing out on earnings. 

A good rule of thumb to start approach­ing 90% of opti­mum earn­ings is at least 20′ above your roof and sur­round­ing roofs.

Here’s an exam­ple of a good ele­va­tion placement:

Correct elevation placement on rooftop

That anten­na is on top of a 23′ pole on top of a 15′ high roof in sub­ur­ban San Diego.

Anec­do­tal reports show that even a *1 meter* ele­va­tion dif­fer­ence can notice­ably affect earnings.

Get as clear a view of as much “civ­i­liza­tion” as pos­si­ble. Remem­ber, the net­work is only as valu­able as the USEFUL area it can cov­er. A hotspot on top of a moun­tain with clear views of noth­ing but nature for 30 miles is not cov­er­ing (to the net­work, any­way) USEFUL territory.

A hotspot on a sub­ur­ban roof sur­round­ed by a few mil­lion peo­ple and lots of data oppor­tu­ni­ties will pro­vide far more use­ful coverage.

Cor­rect ele­va­tion is vital for max­i­mum cov­er­age. LoRa is more or less a line-of-sight radio tech­nol­o­gy. While the radio waves will go through a few things (a wall or two, a win­dow, or a leafy tree), for the most part you want to be able to have a direct line of sight to both your cov­er­age area AND oth­er hotspots. 

APPROPRIATE ANTENNA: The anten­na is what most peo­ple focus on, think­ing that if they just have the “best” anten­na they’ll make the most HNT.

The anten­na shipped with any pur­chased hotspot is already pret­ty good. How­ev­er, as many Heli­ites are both tin­ker­ers and dri­ven by earn­ings, many will “upgrade” their anten­na in order to reach more hotspots.

Anten­nas do 2 things: They trans­mit (tx) and they receive (rx). Most folks get wrapped up in how well an anten­na trans­mits, but in the long term that doesn’t mat­ter that much, as the val­ue of Heli­um is in how well an anten­na can RECEIVE.

Remem­ber, the Heli­um net­work offers val­ue by being able to receive trans­mis­sion FROM sen­sors TO hotspots, then push that infor­ma­tion onto the blockchain via an inter­net connection.

While there is and has been a place for being able to trans­mit pow­er­ful­ly, that val­ue will dimin­ish rapid­ly over the com­ing year.

What the heck is “dBi”? It refers to the focus and shap­ing of the ener­gy an anten­na trans­mits and receives.

Here’s a quick dbi gain visualizer:

I can hear you now: “Ok dude, but what anten­na should I buy?” 

You can read this in-depth arti­cle on how to match your place­ment with an anten­na, but you’ve basi­cal­ly got 3 options. 

First, and rec­om­mend­ed: Don’t buy any­thing, just use the anten­na your hotspot came with. Get your den­si­ty and view squared away first.

Sec­ond, if you’ve got a great place­ment with the right ele­va­tion, buy either an HNTen­na or any­thing in the 3–6 dBi range from McGill.

Third, if you feel like you need some­thing high­er gain and you under­stand the trade offs of a high­er gain anten­na, get a high­er gain anten­na from McGill.

“But, but, what about the [insert fan­cy anten­na] I read about on the Dis­cord chat? Should­n’t I get the most pow­er­ful anten­na pos­si­ble? I want more money!”

Big antenna with a long view on a mountain.

No. Re-read the above piece on hav­ing a “too pow­er­ful” antenna. 

The one pic­tured above is a high gain sec­tor (direc­tion­al) anten­na on top of a moun­tain. Despite hav­ing an enor­mous “view”, it does worse than many place­ments that are much clos­er to oth­er hotspots. I replaced it with a 3 dBi omni, no dif­fer­ence in earn­ings. Den­si­ty mat­ters more than antenna.

Even “hot” anten­nas that are tuned to fit with­in Heli­um guide­lines (decreased trans­mit and receive pow­er) won’t rad­i­cal­ly out­per­form oth­er antennas.

One Hotspot own­er I know ran a Near­son 9 vs a Rak 8 dBi in ear­ly 2021 and kept track of earn­ings between the two. The RAK beat the pants off the Nearson.

MINIMIZED CONNECTIONS: Ok, now we’re com­ing to stuff that does­n’t real­ly mat­ter but you’ll ask about and geek out on any­way. How should you con­nect your hotspot to your antenna?

This is RF 101 (Radio Fre­quen­cy): You want a thick, clean, short (ide­al­ly 5′ or less) cable that goes from your hotspot to your anten­na. I rec­om­mend and use LMR400 from USACoax.

If you’re run­ning a cel­lu­lar back­haul you’ll prob­a­bly be fine with anoth­er LMR vari­ant for the cell anten­nas (each set­up is unique) but you will want to place those cell anten­nas exter­nal to the enclosure.

Get your hotspot up high near your anten­na to keep cable runs to the anten­na short. Run pow­er and eth­er­net to the high hotspot, then have a short anten­na cable to the anten­na. Do not (if you want max earn­ings) place your hotspot in your attic then run 20′ of thin crap­py coax cable to your anten­na. That will cre­ate more radio pow­er loss than you want. 

If you MUST have long cable runs, spend the mon­ey on good cable. If you do that, you may (but prob­a­bly won’t) get the same results as Docile Bone Pony, which uses 60′ of LMR 400 and is on top of a 16 sto­ry build­ing in the mid­dle of a large city. 

So. That’s most of what you need to know about a opti­mum hotspot placement. 

ADDENDA

What else should you know about when it comes to Heli­um hotspot earnings?

How much HNT you get per witness/beacon trans­ac­tion will change as the net­work devel­ops more ful­ly. With a lim­it­ed amount of HNT made avail­able (2.5 mil­lion per month until August 2023, when it drops to 1.25 million/month) to reward trans­ac­tions AND many more hotspots com­ing online in the next few months, earn­ings will steadi­ly dilute.

Yeah, but how much can I earn? Check here for a very rough esti­mate. This can change sig­nif­i­cant­ly, so it’s just a start­ing point.

No mat­ter what, with the growth of the net­work your HNT earn­ings will CONTINUE TO DROP.

This MAY be off­set by an increase in HNT price. It may not. 

How can I earn even more? The long play with Heli­um is to fig­ure out how to actu­al­ly use the ser­vice. What kind of data can you col­lect, what kind of sen­sors should you use, how can you offer that as a service? 

If you want help with that or with opti­miz­ing your hotspot place­ments, I’m avail­able for hire.

How much pow­er and data do hotspots use? Hotspots use about as much pow­er as an inter­net router, and as much data as heavy Net­flix user who watch­es 2 or 3 movies most nights (100–150 GB/month). This will con­tin­ue to increase until Light Hotspots come online some­time in ear­ly 2022. 

If you live in the First World and have a broad­band inter­net con­nec­tion, hav­ing a Heli­um Hotspot will be basi­cal­ly unno­tice­able to you from an ener­gy cost/data use perspective.

I’m ready to buy a hotspot, where should I order? I’d rec­om­mend order­ing a hotspot from Par­ley­Labs.

Is there a dif­fer­ence in hotspots/miners/radios? Not real­ly. It’s not like you can get a more pow­er­ful min­er that’ll earn you more. The biggest dif­fer­ence is when they’ll arrive, which is a func­tion of how fast they can be manufactured.

Is it real­ly worth it to put up a Heli­um hotspot? I sure think so. Will it be for you? If you have an opti­mal place­ment and fol­low all the advice above, prob­a­bly. This isn’t invest­ment advice. You could lose all the mon­ey you put in. 

How much can I make? If you do a good job, between .5 — 1 HNT/day as of March of 2022. More on that here. Or just go to Site­bot and start pok­ing around to see what the cur­rent max­i­mums are. 

How do I turn HNT into cash? Open up an account on any rep­utable exchange. 

Is this a safe invest­ment? No. This is cryp­tocur­ren­cy com­pet­ing with giant tel­cos (Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­pa­nies). It may be a boomer (like when Uber com­pet­ed with cabs or Airbnb com­pet­ed with hotels) or it may be a flop (like every oth­er start­up com­pa­ny that tried to take on the big dogs.)

You should not re-finance your house to put up hotspots. You should be able to lose all the mon­ey you put into hotspots with­out putting your­self, your fam­i­ly, or any­one you know at finan­cial risk. Sheesh. 

Should I just hire you to do all the work for me? Maybe. If you don’t like to read or geek out, or you just want to try Heli­um with­out spend­ing a few months research­ing it, I’ll walk you through the process of set­ting up the best pos­si­ble place­ment for your sit­u­a­tion. You can take my cours­es (look on the top of the page under Cours­es) or go here to get started.

RESOURCES

Software

  • Heli­um Vision — Paid ser­vice w/free tri­al for assess­ing loca­tions. Def­i­nite­ly try this out!
  • Hotspot­ty — Excel­lent way to visu­al­ize den­si­ty issues AND to man­age your fleet
  • HotspotRF — use code gristleking for 20% off your first month.

Mapping

Hardware

Media & Learning Resources

Comments

297 responses to “A Rough Guide To Helium Hotspot Placement”

  1. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    As long as you have a clear line of sight to the oth­er loca­tions, 5–6 km is an easy shot. Whether or not it’s a good invest­ment is up to you. Check what the oth­er hotspots are earn­ing to get an idea of what you might earn.

  2. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    in that case is 4 dbi ante­na will be strong enough or should i get stronger 5 or 8?

  3. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    ill checked and 2 of them earn­ing approx­i­mate­ly 50–60 HNT every 30 days which is fine for me ‚my ques­tion is if you will be so kind just con­firm for me if i can earn about the same those 2 hotspot are locat­ed in Latvia Riga and address­es are Mat?sa iela, R?ga and Br?v?bas iela, R?ga or the hot spot names Short Hazel­nut Rac­coon and Strong Holo­graph­ic Mink .
    I live in the same town street name is Bukaisu iela i checked on web­site https://www.scadacore.com/tools/rf-path/rf-line-of-sight/ and its show­ing kind of green ‚can yo have a look and thank you for your time .

  4. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Greg, I’d be hap­py to go through a Stan­dard Con­sult with you and dive deep­er into min­er earn­ings, strat­e­gy, and place­ment. You can book that here.

  5. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    i will think about it ‚just before i decide to do that can you at list tell me know­ing my posi­tion and the dis­tance from me to oth­er 2 hot spot to earn as much they do 50–60 HNT how much i would have to invest exclud­ing your price ?

  6. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Typ­i­cal costs for an out­door set­up run $800–1,200. You can get away with cheap­er, it’s all depen­dent on how high you want to go. After place­ment, height is everything.

  7. Ed Avatar
    Ed

    You men­tion men­tion docile bone pony’s set­up on top of a 16 sto­ry build­ing. Are they just using the stock anten­na or some­thing else.
    I live on the 10th floor of a build­ing with a bal­cony. If anten­na is on bal­cony, would it only receive sig­nals away from build­ing? Would my own build­ing pre­vent sig­nals reach­ing anten­na from oppo­site direc­tion? Thanks

  8. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    They’re using an anten­na bought off of eBay, I thought I put a link to it. Will go back and check.

    Your own build­ing will cer­tain­ly damp­en the sig­nals, but LoRa can punch through a wall or two.

  9. kat Avatar
    kat

    I am very close to a hotspot that is at 600 m of my house. that hotspot is on the 1st floor, I am on the 3th floor and in between there are no hous­es but there is about 100 m of for­est in between (with leaves). Is it worth to place a hotspot or will the trees pre­vent good cov­er­age. both hotspots will have a 5dbi antenna.

  10. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Kat, you should be fine at that dis­tance. Keep me post­ed when you get it up!

  11. bsap Avatar
    bsap

    So there’s one oth­er active node not far from me, but that’s it for my city. I need to look into this over the week­end, but in my sit­u­a­tion is it pos­si­ble to prof­it? Or is this some­thing an area real­ly has to have a few peo­ple par­tic­i­pat­ing in to see any returns?

  12. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    You’ll want at least 4 for a shot at max prof­its, but going from 1 to 2 is the sin­gle biggest jump.

  13. JR Avatar
    JR

    I live in the UK and have 3 indoor Nebra min­ers on the way. I have loca­tions ready for set­up. They will all be with­in a 2.5 mile radius but not in the sweet spot (just out­side 300m). Would this dras­ti­cal­ly affect prof­its or should the radius suf­fice? I have also ordered 8dbi glass fiber anten­nas for two of them. Would this opti­mise prof­its or would it be bet­ter to keep the stock anten­nas (3dbi)? Real­ly appre­ci­ate your advice and I found this arti­cle incred­i­bly informative.

  14. Jacob Coody Avatar
    Jacob Coody

    So, how much do you know about the pri­va­cy of the hotspots? If I were a com­pa­ny want­i­ng to uti­lize the net­work, how wor­ried should I be that some­one could hack my IoT devices?

  15. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Jacob, from a home net­work per­spec­tive they’re con­sid­ered about as safe as a wire­less print­er, so if you use one of those there’s no rea­son to not use this. As far as hack­ing the device to get to the data, let’s put it this way: If you could do that you’d be work­ing for the NSA, not crack­ing IoT devices. 🙂

  16. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    JR, don’t wor­ry about that “sweet spot” on Heli­umPlace, that’s mis­lead­ing. Even a 4dBi anten­na can reach over 100 miles, although gen­er­al­ly you can assume that a stock anten­na with clear line of sight will rou­tine­ly hit gate­ways 8–10km away.

    Try switch­ing out the anten­nas to see what hap­pens, usu­al­ly the RAK 8 is overkill and has too nar­row of a pat­tern, but they can also work real­ly well. RF is weird. 🙂

  17. Pete Avatar
    Pete

    Hi Nik,

    Great info. I live in the Boni­ta area 91902. I went through my HAAT cal­cu­la­tions and got a num­ber of about ‑126 using a 6 meter pole on my one sto­ry house. There are two oth­er home in Boni­ta that I cal­cu­lat­ed have about a ‑90. They are about 1.5 miles away in two dif­fer­ent directions.

    I have a few ques­tions if you don’t mind answering.

    1. I would expect I need a low dbi anten­na con­sid­er­ing my loca­tion. Is that about right? Any spe­cif­ic one you can recommend?

    2. Is hav­ing a ‑126 HAAT con­sid­ered bad or does the type of anten­na com­pen­sate for that?

    Thanks,
    Pete

  18. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Pete, HAAT is a lit­tle deep­er than most go with calcs, nice work! Check it with LoS on Heli­umVi­sion, that’ll prob­a­bly be way eas­i­er. :). Low dBi is usu­al­ly fine, espe­cial­ly with a 6 meter pole. Rock on!

  19. Helium Nieuws #3 - 8 mei 2021 - Helium Nederland Community

    […] voor een uit­ge­brei­der antwo­ord deze ‘rough guide to heli­um hotspot place­ment‘ (in het Engels) van Nik Hawks, waarin hij voor­beelden geeft wat een opti­male set­up is voor […]

  20. Trey Avatar
    Trey

    I ordered a bob­cat that should be here in 12 weeks or so (hope­ful­ly). I plan on mount­ing my bob­cat in a nema4x enclo­sure on the side of my chim­ney and then run­ning 10–20ft of cable from that up a pole to my anten­na. Your arti­cle says 5’ is ide­al. I guess my ques­tion is with­out test­ing it which is more ide­al, the height of my anten­na or the length of my cable?

  21. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    I don’t quite under­stand the ques­tion, but in gen­er­al the ele­va­tion of the anten­na is far more impor­tant than the length of the anten­na cable.

  22. David Avatar
    David

    Hey Nick, my home is with­in 300 meters of a neigh­bor­ing hotspot. As you men­tioned my earn­ings will real­ly suf­fer by 50%? 

    That sounds like my home would­n’t be a viable place to put it at this time, although there are about 10 hotspots with­in a few kilo­me­ters of my address.

  23. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Not all your earn­ings, but the trans­mit rewards would def­i­nite­ly get cut.

  24. Kate York Avatar
    Kate York

    Awe­some arti­cle! Thank you for the clarity!

  25. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    No prob Kate, always cool to help peo­ple under­stand this whole com­pli­cat­ed beast a lit­tle better.

  26. mark Avatar
    mark

    What about secu­ri­ty? Can the hotspot be hacked? Or router and home net­work a s a result of set­ting up a node?

  27. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Mark, a hotspot pos­es about the same threat sur­face as a wire­less print­er to your home network.

  28. Helium Hotspot Miners Antennes - Wat is dBi? - Helium Nederland Community

    […] voor een uit­ge­brei­der antwo­ord deze ‘rough guide to heli­um hotspot place­ment‘ (in het Engels) van Nik Hawks, waarin hij voor­beelden geeft wat een opti­male set­up is voor […]

  29. stan Avatar
    stan

    Hi, how will be the sig­nal if I am at the first floor in down­town part of the city and around me are only high build­ings? Is it worth to invest in case like this?

  30. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Stan, depends on whether or not oth­er hotspots are close by and have some kind of Line of Sight to yours. Def­i­nite­ly not the best case scenario.

  31. Pantelis Ambatzis Avatar
    Pantelis Ambatzis

    Can I ser­i­al dou­ble or mul­ti­ple the units

  32. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Nope, that won’t pro­vide any ben­e­fit to the net­work or your spots. Get ’em at least 300m apart.

  33. Nick Avatar
    Nick

    Hi Nik,
    I’ve pur­chased a RAK Hotspot and it’ll be placed in the UK which is 868 Mhz.
    I have also pur­chased an 8 dbi anten­na which is a RAK 8dBi Fiber­glass Anten­na Kit (For 915 MHz Gateways).
    Have I pur­chased the wrong anten­na dbi for the UK and so must I swap it for an 868 Mhz antenna ?
    Thanks

  34. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Should be fine, those are close enough to not be an issue.

  35. JM Avatar
    JM

    What type of con­nec­tors should I get? I have a rak min­er now and will be get­ting a nebra soon. I am try­ing to order the LMR400 cable. I an in NY, live on the first floor of a 2 sto­ry build­ing, pret­ty good clear line of sight as it is res­i­den­tial and most of the hous­es are only 2–3 floors high. I will be putting a 5dbi anten­na on top of the sec­ond floor, maybe a few feet high­er if I am able to. Thanks in advanced.

  36. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Always check with the man­u­fac­tur­ers to see what con­nec­tors you need. Typ­i­cal­ly that’ll be an N‑male to RP-SMA male for most anten­nas and min­ers, but again: ALWAYS check your specs first.

  37. Kashif Avatar
    Kashif

    Hi Nik, hope you are doing best 🙂

    I have a question:

    Do you think there will be any dif­fer­ence in HNT earn­ing if I place a min­er on my roof direct­ly, or I just place anten­na on my roof with 20 meter exten­sion cable (LMR 400) and min­er placed inside my home ground floor?

    Hope you got my ques­tion, sor­ry for my weak English 🙂

    Thanks in advance.

  38. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Depends on the anten­na. A low gain anten­na will prob­a­bly be push­ing it at a 20 meter cable run. If you’re using any­thing above 6 dB gain you’ll be find.

  39. Rodolfo Reyes Avatar
    Rodolfo Reyes

    Hi Nik, if i use the orig­i­nal anten­na from my hotspot do i need to ground it? Or just con­nect­ed directly.

  40. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    If it’s plugged direct­ly into the unit I would­n’t wor­ry about it, but if you’re using an anten­na cable and get­ting the anten­na up high, I’d ground it.

  41. Chase Avatar
    Chase

    Hi Nik, great beard com­bined with great info.

    I’m brows­ing the min­ers avail­able and lean­ing toward the Bob­cat + includ­ed 4dbi anten­na, but depend­ing on your feed­back, I might land on anoth­er and upgrad­ing the antenna.

    I live on the 2nd floor (14 ft from the ground) of a hol­low, rec­tan­gu­lar apart­ment build­ing with a bal­cony that faces inward. The build­ing has a pub­lic bal­cony on the 4th floor fac­ing out­ward with room to dif­fract. How­ev­er, unless there’s a way to lock the cables, the min­er’s fate would be left to chance that the apart­ment staff over­look it AND no one steals it.

    Con­sid­er­ing that there is already one oth­er hotspot with­in 81m of my address and 6 oth­ers rough­ly between 500m — 1km away, would it be rea­son­able to expect sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent results if it faced the inside of my build­ing vs. the 4th floor fac­ing outward?

  42. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Thanks Chase! The Bob­cat should be fine.

  43. Adam Avatar
    Adam

    Hey Nik — amaz­ing arti­cle, very infor­ma­tive — thank you 🙂

    I am in the UK and live in a town which is very hilly. I have looked and the best place to put my BOBCAT 300 min­er will be in the loft. I am look­ing to run a cable for my anten­na from the min­er to the chim­ney where I intend to attached the antenna.
    The hous­es are very close knit so putting it on my chim­ney would be best.
    I was won­der­ing if you could help me with a few ques­tions to max­i­mize the poten­tial of the miner?
    1. Which Anten­na (UK) would you rec­om­mend and the dbi?
    2. which cable is the best to con­nect the min­er to the anten­na externally?
    2. I have a Bob­cat 300 & will be get­ting a Ker­link Heli­um Com­pat­i­ble Wir­net. Will the anten­na, cable etc work for both or would I need dif­fer­ent ones?

    Thank you in advance.

  44. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Adam! 1) Any anten­na should be fine. 2) I use LMR400, I believe McGill Microwave sells those in the UK but you’d have to dou­ble check. 3) Hard to say re com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Ker­link lists both RP-SMA & SMA on their Wir­net list­ing. Bob­cat uses RP-SMA, at least in the US.

  45. Francois Lapierre Avatar
    Francois Lapierre

    Thanks for the Great arti­cle, very instruc­tive ! When the anten­na and the cable are hook up is the sig­nal lost change the angle of cov­er­age of the anten­na, or just reduce the pow­er ? I think its the sec­ond But just want to con­firm my thought. Found a 6 dbi and will need around 30 ft of cable. I live in the sub­urb and plan to put a 10′-15′ mast to my chim­ney (The oil fur­nace is remove so it will be my pipe to the Roof ;0) I am not in a dense Heli­um But hoppe­ful­ly I cand reatch those close some in the Mon­tréal city like some in my town…
    I will fal­low your Post!

  46. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Right on Fran­cois. Yep, you’re cor­rect, the pat­tern does­n’t change, the pow­er just goes down. Keep me post­ed on your deployment!

  47. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    Thank you Nik for this great infor­ma­tion. I have 2 bob­cats and 3 Syncrob.it ordered, the bob­cats should be get­ting here first. I live in a typ­i­cal sub­urb, 2 sto­ry hous­es and trees, in north­west Ohio. It’s flat here and no oth­er min­ers close by (noth­ing with­in miles). I was going to go with the anten­na that they come with, but they’re indoor anten­nas. I think a set­up of an anten­na mount­ed to my chim­ney would work best. For the 2 bob­cats that arrive first, would you rec­om­mend just using the includ­ed anten­na by a 2nd sto­ry win­dow (no screen) with them placed in hous­es about 850m away from each oth­er? Doing that would obvi­ous­ly give me an answer to see if I need to upgrade, but I’m just try­ing to plan ahead. Thank you again for all the great information.

  48. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Matthew, yep, that’s how I’d start if noth­ing else is near­by. Once you start see­ing the area fill in, then you can work on get­ting your anten­na out­doors and up high­er so you can reach those oth­er spots.

  49. Anna Romanov Avatar
    Anna Romanov

    Hel­lo! Please please please help me:
    there was an option “set up loca­tion lat­er” — NO THANKS, I’LL SET UP LOCATION LATER -
    i decid­ed to go on that as first i want­ed to sync and then decide where to place it.
    Now i can­not find a way to fix it and to set up the location.
    I’m sure you know every­thing — let me know please please please))))
    My best, Anna

  50. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Tap on your hotspot in the app, look for the gear icon in the top right cor­ner, then set location. 😉

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