Gristle King - A Guide to DePIN

A Rough Guide To Helium Hotspot Placement

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by

Nik
in ,

This is writ­ten for folks curi­ous about opti­miz­ing a Heli­um Hotspot placement. 

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, you can take a course or hire me.

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. Hotspots record all 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 Binance.

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

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

  1. Jose Avatar
    Jose

    Thank you Nik for this great article.
    On the reward aspect, As the net­work grows, is there any kind of senior­i­ty for the hotspots already in place?

  2. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Nope, every hotspot is eval­u­at­ed on its own with no regard for seniority.

  3. C. Biggums Avatar
    C. Biggums

    Hi Nik,

    I checked my metro area and a 7km area. The 5 with­in 6–7km are earn­ing less than 3 per month. Found oth­ers in town the same, then some around 23 per mo and then one out of the entire metro area was earn­ing almost 100 per mo. 

    Is place­ment most like­ly the dif­fer­ence? Is it pos­si­ble they’re con­nect­ing to every hs with­in a 10mi radius?

    Thanks.

  4. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Yep, WUPU place­ment and anten­na elevation.

  5. When [Bobcat]? - One Man's Search

    […] months ago, Ann at Bob­cat reached out to see if I’d like a hotspot for review. She’d read the Rough Guide To Hotspot Opti­miza­tion arti­cle and liked it. She thought it might be use­ful to get a Bob­cat hotspot into my hands ahead of the […]

  6. Kerry Prudhomme Avatar
    Kerry Prudhomme

    Hi Nik, Thanks for the infor­ma­tion in this arti­cle. I’ve ordered a few Bob­cat min­ers and even after read­ing your arti­cle have ques­tions on anten­na place­ment. The fol­low­ing facts may impact my place­ment of the antenna.
    Flat ele­va­tion — No more than 50′ change in ele­va­tion for 20 miles
    Lots of tall trees sur­round my house.
    My roof is 22′ tall. I plan to install a 40′ pole to mount the anten­na. (From ground level)
    Should I con­sid­er the out­door enclo­sure for the bob­cat there­fore reduc­ing the length of anten­na wire?
    Which anten­na would be best for this situation?

  7. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Any of the out­door ones will be fine. Try and keep anten­na cable runs as short as pos­si­ble. Scroll to the bot­tom on this page.

  8. Rocco Monteleone Avatar
    Rocco Monteleone

    Hi Nik,
    AWESEOME post thank you.

    If I am the first to deploy 10 cor­rect­ly posi­tioned hotspots in a town that had none to begin with, will that earn good income ?

  9. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Roc­co, thanks! Being the first in an area does­n’t do any­thing extra for you. Hav­ing 10 cor­rect­ly posi­tioned hotspots is the main thing. Get ’em!

  10. corey huguley Avatar
    corey huguley

    I would like more infor­ma­tion about your set­up on out­side heli­um min­er. I I own 66 aces of land and I would like to use my land. I would like to cre­ate my own net­work. Also, cur­rent­ly its none locat­ed in my area.

  11. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Sure, cruise over to the “Heli­um Off Grid” blog post. 😉

  12. Chris reid Avatar
    Chris reid

    Dude Nik you sir are a god ole broth­er, I did­n’t real­ize until I read this whole arti­cle and went to the bot­tom and rec­og­nized your face and real­ized I just read up on your whole adven­ture off grid and up the moun­tain, if I ever cross your path broth­er i“d like to buy you a beer or two if that’s alright. And your right there’s far more things that these hotspots can uti­lize, prac­ti­cal­ly end­less oppor­tu­ni­ty if you read up on it, sad­ly not enough peo­ple take up that oppor­tu­ni­ty, but hope­ful­ly with your words of wis­dom peo­ple will!! I do have a ques­tion for ya that i have yet to find info on, one of my HS are in a rural­ish area, clos­est one to it is rough­ly 4 miles then about 14 oth­ers rang­ing from 6–12 miles that I pick up, but i have a 280′ com­mer­cial radio tow­er 1/4′ mile from me, would this cre­at any kind of sig­nal decrease or loss try­ing to “com­pete” across the waves or am I think­ing all wrong? I know a few cell com­pa­ny’s have anten­nas there, along with a few rail­road com­pa­nies, a water com­pa­ny and a few “not list­ed” anten­nas there aswell. Did­n’t know if some­thing like that this close would cause any type of inter­fer­ence. Thanks again broth­er for all you do, keep it up, look for­ward to read­ing more, hope­ful­ly hear from ya soon.

  13. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hey Chris, thanks! Should­n’t be issues with inter­fer­ence at that range. Most­ly the prob­lem is that you’re too far away from oth­er hotspots. While they *can* com­mu­ni­cate over long dis­tances, they *like* to com­mu­ni­cate right around the 600–1,200m mark.

  14. Chris Avatar
    Chris

    347.5 HNT per month WTH?!

    36.076849452137076, ‑115.28299816633508 is my loca­tion and my neigh­bor (Polite Shad­ow Chim­panzee) is mak­ing over 300 HNT month­ly! BUT it looks like many oth­ers in the area are only mak­ing about 10–30HNT monthly.

    The ter­rain is pret­ty flat, and I’m about 1/2 mile away from them, Using the RFhotspot esti­ma­tion tool it pre­dicts about 240 HNT month­ly for me, which sounds too good to be true at HALF that amount.

    I have a Bob­cat enroute from chi­na (due here tues­day 22nd june) Do they make an enclo­sure to allow me to put it on a pole on the roof?? or should i stick it in the win­dow and hope for the best? 

    LAST ques­tion, Can I move my min­er once it’s been set up (like put in the win­dow first then lat­er raise on a pole out­side after buy­ing prop­er wire and pos­si­bly enclosure) 

    I’ll drop you some HNT if you can get back to me to help, thanks!

  15. Teodora Avatar
    Teodora

    Hi Nick, I pur­chased a RAK min­er and I am plan­ning to place it on a roof. I’m also think­ing about buy­ing a RAK out­door enclo­sure from store.rakwireless to be able to fix the min­er as close as pos­si­ble to the anten­na as you advised. I have doubts about how extreme tem­per­a­tures can dam­age the min­er. In the area I live in tem­per­a­ture can vary in the range 5 to 105 F. The enclo­sure will be exposed to direct sun­light with­out any shade and that makes me ner­vous with sum­mer approach­ing :). Do you have any advice as to do we need to pro­vide addi­tion­al pro­tec­tion to the enclo­sure to avoid over­heat­ing or freez­ing or it should be good to go as it is? Many thanks in advance 🙂

  16. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Chris, sounds like you’d ben­e­fit from a con­sult­ing ses­sion; I go into all of that in detail. In gen­er­al, 300 HNT is total­ly achiev­able but depends heav­i­ly on loca­tion and anten­na ele­va­tion. You can put any indoor min­er in an enclo­sure, lots of enclo­sures are avail­able for dif­fer­ent setups. You can move your min­er once you’ve set it up; you do that through the Heli­um app and it costs ~$10 to do each time.

  17. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Check with RAK about the min­er & enclo­sure; both should be fine. I’ve heard of hotspots in sealed enclo­sures live through the sum­mer in Texas. I’d pro­vide some kind of shade for the box if I could, as every lit­tle bit will help. I would­n’t wor­ry about the cold; com­put­ers love being chilly. 🙂

  18. Teodora Avatar
    Teodora

    Thank you so much! That was very helpful! 🙂

  19. Bryan Avatar
    Bryan

    I’ve seen that build­ing a hotspot is no longer allowed because peo­ple were tak­ing advan­tage of the sys­tem. What were they doing? Just putting a bunch in one spot and say they were oth­er places? Doesn’t seem very smart. Seems like the same IP address would give them away pret­ty quick­ly. Plus wouldn’t the sig­nal be real­ly strong and throw up res flags?

  20. Rabih Avatar
    Rabih

    Hel­lo Nik thank you for this very help­ful infor­ma­tions. I live in a vil­lage in the moun­tain with high pop­u­la­tion but a lot of hills up and down. Does this mat­ter for the hotspots? I mean if i put one on the top of a hill will the one down the hill con­nect to the one on top?
    Thank you a lot for your reply?

  21. Pascal Avatar
    Pascal

    Hey Nik! Great post and thank you for shar­ing your knowledge.

    I just received my RAK HNT min­er and I am try­ing to find where to place it. I have 2 oth­er min­ers com­ing hope­ful­ly any­time soon (Nebra & SyncronB.it)

    I have two options:
    1. I place the min­er in my apart­ment in Man­hat­tan. Based on helium.place I have 6 oth­er hotspots (orange and red col­or cod­ing) in my “invalid wit­ness zone” and 15+ hotspots in my “sweetspot” (green area) — I checked some of their rewards and its not more than like 20–30 a month.
    2. I can place the min­er at my in-laws out­side the city. Based on helium.place I would be the only hotspot. I only see two hotspots around me but 1.2–1.4 miles (2KM) away. Not sure if they would see each other.

    Would love to get your opin­ion. Thank you very much for your help.

  22. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Bryan, basi­cal­ly a slight­ly more sophis­ti­cat­ed ver­sion of that. If you look way back in Dis­cord for “Modesto” you’ll see the dis­cus­sion on it. In one case a gamer made 70k HNT in a day; it was a real problem.

  23. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Rabih,
    If they have a clear line of sight they’ll be able to com­mu­ni­cate. Does that make sense?

  24. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Pas­cal,
    Def­i­nite­ly don’t put any more in Man­hat­tan; that place is way over­crowd­ed. Try look­ing for a third option, where you have at least 4 min­ers with­in a sweet spot of 6–1,200 meters away.

  25. Pascal Avatar
    Pascal

    Thank you Nik. I real­ly appre­ci­ate the quick reply.
    Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I don’t have a third option at the moment. I checked the address­es of all my in-laws (LOL) and no one has oth­er min­ers in their sweet spot. At least for now.
    I will keep look­ing but I think I will place the min­er at my in-laws. There are only two around me but not with­in the 1,2km range you rec­om­mend. Once I get my sec­ond min­er I would place it near my first one in a sweet spot area. What do you think?

  26. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    That sounds OK; do you have any friends, co-work­ers, or know any busi­ness own­ers in bet­ter loca­tions? Loca­tion is king in this game, so it’s impor­tant to get that right.

  27. Pascal Avatar
    Pascal

    I need to check but my entire life is in Man­hat­tan — LOL. I checked the loca­tion of my friend in D.C.. He has 3 min­ers with­in the red zone but based helium.place they have all a 0.5 to 0.8 reward scale. There are 15+ min­ers in the sweet spot zoon. Does that sound bet­ter than plac­ing it at my in-laws out­side the city?

  28. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Time for a road trip and mak­ing new friends. If you’re going to move it, move it to a great spot, not just one step up from yours.

  29. Alex Avatar
    Alex

    Can you do an arti­cle on anten­na trans­mis­sion patterns? 

    I have an anten­na that is a dipole with the joint in the cen­ter, would be curi­ous to see how this fares in the city.

  30. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Sure, check this out.

  31. John James Avatar
    John James

    Hey Nik — not sure if this is a good idea, but I would like your opin­ion on it. What if I set up 2 nebra min­ers in the same build­ing (top floor). One from my apart­ment, and anoth­er one from a neigh­bor. Each will have it’s own wifi con­nec­tion, but here’s the dif­fer­ence — one will have the stock 3 dbi anten­na, and the oth­er will have a 5dbi anten­na. This way the 5dbi over­shoots the 3 dbi pre­vent­ing them from com­pet­ing with each oth­er. I live about 20 miles from NYC, and both of my min­ers are fac­ing West. The 3dbi min­er should be able to reach Man­hat­tan, while the 5 dbi should reach New Jer­sey with plen­ty of min­ers for both to wit­ness and chal­lenge. Because I live on the top floor, I have no issues with line of sight, and should be able to reach as far as the anten­nas can reach. Do you think this will work? Thanks in advance.

  32. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi John,
    Depends on what you mean by “will this work?” By hav­ing 2 min­ers in the same res 8 hex, you’ll clip your earn­ings for each one by 50% in most cas­es. They’ll still earn, but at less capac­i­ty than they oth­er­wise would.

  33. Kashif Avatar
    Kashif

    Hi Nik,

    Thank you very much for your con­tin­ued sup­port of us.

    I have a question,

    How much long exten­sion cable I can attach with a stock anten­na of bob­cat min­er? Do you think this will work fine with up to 15–20 meters exten­sion cable?

    May God Bless You !!!

  34. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Kashif, there are two (well, 3) types of cables. First is the pow­er cord; stan­dard rules apply there. Sec­ond is the eth­er­net between your router and the hotspot — max is 100m. 3rd is the anten­na cable. That’s the one we real­ly want to keep as short as pos­si­ble, but has a few vari­ables to it. Check over here for more.

  35. Jerome Nadeau Avatar
    Jerome Nadeau

    Hi Nik, Here is my prob­lem with find­ing busi­ness­es to accept hav­ing one on their prop­er­ty. They all want rental $$ for space and a lease. My ques­tion is, what is nor­mal in your opin­ion to entice a prop­er­ty own­er to accept. Most I run across want $400.00 a month plus a year com­mit­ment. Total cost at this site would be $500.00 per. $100.00 for inter­net access.

  36. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    That’s more than I’d pay, for sure. Check out the Get­ting Your Hotspot On A Com­mer­cial Build­ing post for more on this.

  37. Ernestoxx Avatar
    Ernestoxx

    can you make a post about the con­nec­tors for the LMR400 for each miner.
    For exam­ple i have a bob­cat min­er ordered. and i want to use it out­doors by putting a cov­er. so i will have an lmr400 instead of the one that comes with the Anten­na. But what con­nec­tors should i put on the lmr?

  38. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Will this help?

  39. Todd Eide Avatar
    Todd Eide

    What if I life on a farm and i can run lora cable 1000–1200 feet in mul­ti­ple direc­tions and leave the actu­al box in my house con­nect­ed to eth­er­net. Would this work?

  40. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Nope. You don’t want to have mul­ti­ple hotspots on the same IP (looks like gam­ing to Heli­um), nor do you want long anten­na cable runs.

  41. JT Avatar
    JT

    Any advice for non-pen­e­trat­ing roof mounts for aten­nas on an nor­mal res­i­den­tial roof? Haven’t found a great solu­tion that does­n’t require drilling holes in the wall or throw­ing cin­derblocks up on a roof which prob­a­bly would work well for a com­mer­cial grade roof but prob­a­bly not all that safe for a stan­dard home

  42. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hey JT, you can skip a few of the cin­derblocks if you’re not going to add a 20′ pole to the non-pen roof mount. You might also look into clamp­ing options like chim­ney straps.

  43. Tyler Avatar
    Tyler

    Hey NIK, I appre­ci­ate the thor­ough infor­ma­tion you pre­sent­ed! I was won­der­ing what your opin­ion was for those look­ing to start now? Know­ing that the earn­ing amount is going to take a sharp decline in August, and that I wouldn’t be get­ting my hotspot for 3–6 months.

  44. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Tyler, it depends on your goals & expec­ta­tions as well as the place­ments you have avail­able. IF you have a great place­ment, it’s worth watch­ing eBay for min­ers in hand. Prices will con­tin­ue to drop there, and you’ll get it faster than one ordered from the fac­to­ry. If you want to play the long game and have an actu­al use case, that would be the dri­ver for a “pur­chase from mfr” decision.

  45. Tyler Avatar
    Tyler

    Thank you for the reply! I hon­est­ly don’t have a great place­ment. I’m in a city with only a few, and the near­est one is a few miles away.

  46. Kashif Avatar
    Kashif

    Hi Nik, how are you buddy?

    I come again with anoth­er ques­tion, hope you won’t mind 😉

    Can you please, is there any option to hide the pri­va­cy of the heli­um min­er loca­tion? I mean on the heli­um cov­er­age map when I see my hotspot then this should not show the exact home loca­tion. Like it should show it’s on the next street or so, although it’s plant­ed on my home. Hope you got my point.

    Because I don’t want that my neigh­bours or rel­a­tives should not know what I am doing at the moment.

    Best Regards.

  47. Devon Avatar
    Devon

    Hi Kashif it seems your issue will be resolved with https://explorer-beta.helium.com/ which we will be trans­fer­ring to short­ly, cur­rent­ly it is in BETA get­ting ready for it’s full release. This will only show amounts of hotspots in a giv­en hex, rather than show­ing exact­ly where you are. Hope this helps you out with your question.

  48. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Sure, I think it’s rea­son­able to assert your loca­tion any­where with­in 100m of where it actu­al­ly is. I usu­al­ly tell clients to assert it in the mid­dle of the near­est inter­sec­tion that’s with­in that dis­tance. In time, that strat­e­gy and tol­er­ance may change, but for now that’s the best option.

  49. Kashif Avatar
    Kashif

    Hey Nik, you are awe­some. You helped me a lot by say­ing I can assert my hotspot loca­tion around 100 meters away from the actu­al loca­tion to hide my privacy.

    Tell me if I have two loca­tions for two hotspots, and the dis­tance between these two loca­tions is 200 meters. As you know we should place hotspots away at least 300 meters away from each oth­er. So, in this case, if I assert my first loca­tion 100 meters away from the actu­al loca­tion and in this case both hotspots now show 300 meters dis­tance, then will it ful­fill the min­i­mum 300 meters tar­get to get proof of coverage.

    I am sor­ry if this is a sil­ly ques­tion, but maybe some­one also has the same ques­tion in their mind 🙂

    Best Regards.

  50. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Kashif, you *should* assert your min­er where it is. Now, with that said, I think it’s OK to assert it with­in about 100m just to retain pri­va­cy. As of July 2021, Heli­um does­n’t have a great way to pro­tect your pri­va­cy. Assert­ing a min­er in a loca­tion it isn’t actu­al­ly in for rea­sons oth­er than pri­va­cy is frowned upon (although I’m sure plen­ty of peo­ple do it). 

    If you have 2 loca­tions that are 200m apart, you real­ly only have one loca­tion. At least, that’s how I see it.

    Think about it this way: 2 min­ers that are actu­al­ly close togeth­er but are assert­ed 300m apart aren’t real­ly pro­vid­ing the net­work any ben­e­fit. They’re more of a gam­ing set­up. You’re bet­ter off find­ing a new and com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent location.

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