How To Know Where To Place Your Hotspot For Max Earnings

Ready to go deep on opti­miz­ing your hotspot? This lever­ages the fun­da­men­tals of WUPU and assumes you have more than a pass­ing knowl­edge of Heli­um. I’ll pull back the cur­tain a lit­tle bit and share exam­ples of the strate­gies I use. The list of strate­gies cov­ered in this post is at the bot­tom, under the Terms, Tools, and Strate­gies (TTS) section.

Why am I doing this? By shar­ing knowl­edge about how to best deploy a Heli­um Hotspot, we make the net­work over­all more robust and like­ly to suc­ceed. If, like many peo­ple, this is your first expo­sure to phys­i­cal net­works, or anten­na place­ment, or just radio com­mu­ni­ca­tions in gen­er­al, you’ll prob­a­bly make mis­takes that will cost you HNT and will cost the net­work good coverage. 

If you’d like to take a course on using one of the most pow­er tools, Heli­umVi­sion, check out the one I built here:

Ok, we’ll start with WUPU. WUPU stands for Wide, Unique, Prove­able, and Use­ful cov­er­age. For a hotspot to earn max­i­mum HNT rewards it has to meet all of those. We’ll go through exam­ples of each one.

First, let’s do Wide. The more cov­er­age you have, the more options you’ll have for the Well Fit Belt strat­e­gy we’ll go into lat­er. Com­mon mis­takes when assess­ing a hotspot for whether or not it has Wide cov­er­age are to look just at the pret­ty green dots on Explor­er and not see topo­graph­i­cal restric­tions. Here’s an exam­ple of a client show­ing me what they thought might be a great Edge strat­e­gy (defined in the TTS sec­tion at the bot­tom) for Wide coverage.

What’s the kick­er? In Explor­er, this looks like it might be at the foot of that moun­tain range to the east, and that those moun­tains might even help focus your cov­er­age to the north and west, poten­tial­ly reach­ing all the way into the L.A. superclusters.

Here’s what the RF sim­u­la­tion looks like in Helium.Vision:

You know how many hotspots that place­ment will con­nect with? Zero. Being buried in a val­ley will kill your coverage. 

Yep, despite seem­ing like a poten­tial­ly great Wide place­ment option for an Edge deploy­ment, you’ve got to look at the total pic­ture, and topog­ra­phy is a big deal. Oh, and ALWAYS pull an RF sim on any pro­posed place­ment. I use Helium.Vision for their RF sims as well as the mul­ti­ple oth­er data sources you can pull in, full video on how to use that tool here.

Ok, next in WUPU is the Unique aspect. This can be a con­fus­ing thing, as it does­n’t mean that your hotspot needs to pro­vide total­ly unique cov­er­age. It’s just that your cov­er­age should not dupli­cate, or even come close to dupli­cat­ing, anoth­er hotspots coverage. 

Here’s a great exam­ple of doing a ter­ri­ble job at Unique place­ment. Behold the Great Taffy Boa in Puer­to Rico, with what appears at first glance a Unique place­ment in the mid­dle of the west half of the island. It might be Lone Wolf-ing it, but at least it’s pro­vid­ing Unique cov­er­age. Or is it?

This is an exam­ple of what hap­pens when you order two hotspots to dou­ble your earn­ings, then just plonk your sec­ond hotspot down at Grand­ma Sal­lie’s house who lives right next door. Let’s zoom in on that place­ment that appeared to be Unique:

Those two hotspots are in the same Res 8 hex, pro­vid­ing dupli­cate cov­er­age, with both earn­ings get­ting trans­mit reward clipped at a .50 Reward scale. Talk about leav­ing mon­ey on the table! You could move one of those to anoth­er loca­tion 300 meters away and dou­ble your earn­ings on BOTH hotspots, meet­ing at least 2 of the WUPU require­ments (Unique and Proveable. 

That brings us to Prove­able. Your hotspot can (and should, if you want to earn!) over­lap cov­er­age with oth­er hotspots, thus mak­ing your cov­er­age Prove­able through a dis­tance and bear­ing read­ing of the radio waves being trans­mit­ted and received. Here’s where the dance real­ly begins, as the more loca­tions you can “Prove” with, the gen­er­al­ly bet­ter your earn­ings will be, up to a lim­it. What’s that lim­it? Why, 25, of course. This brings us to the Well Fit Belt strategy.

The Well Fit Belt strat­e­gy is to find an area where your hotspot can wit­ness 25 oth­er hotspots with­in the range of your anten­na. Any more than 25 and you’re wast­ing effort. Less than 25 and you’re leav­ing earn­ings on the table. The min­i­mum you want wit­ness­ing your bea­con for max­ing out your earn­ings is 4, but why would you try and max­i­mize with a minimum?

Typ­i­cal­ly, the “belt” around your hotspot (assum­ing clear LoS in all direc­tions) goes from 300m (min dis­tance to wit­ness) to 8–10km, which is with­in the range of the stock anten­na and there­fore every hotspot. Here’s a chart (from @para1 on Dis­cord) show­ing the dis­tances at which hotspots are witnessing.

What does that mean? You can draw a 10 km cir­cle around your poten­tial place­ment and be pret­ty sure that unless you’ve got some­thing in the way (moun­tains, hills, build­ings, etc), you’ll hit the hotspots with­in your cir­cle (unless you’re in a Canyons & Crags sit­u­a­tion, more on that later.) 

Here’s an exam­ple of a 10km belt with the 300m stand­off around the HS:

You’d want to look for a place­ment like this, with lots of hotspots (at least 25) with­in that belt area. The 300m stand­off in the inner cir­cle is actu­al­ly a lit­tle big as drawn, but it won’t hurt you to treat that as a 400–500m area any­way, as you’ll pro­vide more net­work cov­er­age with fur­ther spread apart hotspots with­out impact­ing your own earnings. 

What should a well placed hotspot in a Well Fit Belt look like when it comes to wit­ness­es? Let me show you:

This hotspot is nail­ing a ton of oth­er hotspots all with­in that 10 km belt. Sure, it’s hit­ting out­siders as well, but not as reli­ably or eas­i­ly. Focus on your Well Fit Belt!

What about earn­ings? This is one of my fave exam­ple hotspots. I worked with the own­er to make sure it was up as high as pos­si­ble, and we’re both pleased with the results.

Keep in mind those earn­ings will con­tin­ue to drop across the board, this is just a snap­shot in late April 2021 with only 28k hotspots on the net­work.

The final part of the WUPU acronym is Use­ful. Remem­ber, the whole idea of the Heli­um net­work is to pro­vide use­ful cov­er­age to IoT devices. You can have a great set­up, but if it’s not actu­al­ly trans­mit­ting data then you’re not real­ly con­tribut­ing, you’re just tak­ing. This is a great rea­son to buy a least one sen­sor and put it up near your hotspot. It can be any­thing, from an LHT-65 that tells you the humid­i­ty and tem­per­a­ture (and is a very fast way to check if you’re HS is still up and pro­cess­ing data) all the way out to cus­tom built weight plates, horse coun­ters, bomb snif­fers, and and snow depth measurements. 

Sign up for a Con­sole account, pro­vi­sion the device, con­nect to Dat­a­cake or MyDe­vices Cayenne and get just a lit­tle deep­er into how the Heli­um net­work oper­ates. I believe, with­out any evi­dence, that hav­ing a sen­sor pass data through your hotspot improves your earn­ings. Again, no evi­dence for that, just my expe­ri­ence and hunch.

I’ll fin­ish out by talk­ing about look­ing for a “uni­corn” oppor­tu­ni­ty, one I call Canyons & Crags. This is a hotspot that placed in such a way that it’s able to wit­ness and bea­con to many oth­er hotspots that can’t see each oth­er, just as if it was up above a bunch of canyons and crags all filled with hotspots. 

This most­ly hap­pens in cities, where the build­ings form canyons & crags that block RF sig­nals between low hotspots and allow high, well placed spots, to com­mu­ni­cate with all the low­er ones. This focus­es earn­ings on the high hotspots. Find­ing those Canyons & Crags oppor­tu­ni­ties is one of the things I help my clients con­sid­er and iden­ti­fy for their deploy­ments, as a well done C&C place­ment will put you amongst the top HNT earn­ers world wide.

Ok, that’s a walk through WUPU and some advanced strate­gies. If you’d like me to cus­tomize a strat­e­gy for you and walk you through exact­ly how to make the most of your par­tic­u­lar oppor­tu­ni­ty, head over to my Heli­um Con­sult­ing page and sign up for a ses­sion. I’d love to help YOU make the most out of Helium!

Rock on!

-Nik

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Tools, Terms, Strategies 

• Edge Strat­e­gy — Plac­ing your hotspot on the edge of one or more clus­ters, usu­al­ly with the intent to con­nect 2 unre­lat­ed clusters
• WUPU — Wide, Unique, Prove­able, Use­ful coverage
• Canyons & Crags — Plac­ing a hotspot where it can “see” many oth­er hotspots that can’t see each oth­er, focus­ing earn­ings on the high hotstpot
• Well Fit Belt — Using the 25 wit­ness lim­it for Heli­um to find a place­ment with­in the aver­age con­tact dis­tance of 25 or more hotspots with­in LoS
• Helium.Vision — This is THE tool for pow­er users. There are oth­er excel­lent tools for one-off place­ments, like Helium.Place and HotspotRF, but for those of you look­ing for a top 1% place­ment HV is the go-to tool.