An (Early) Rough Guide to Setting Up GEODNET

The Heli­um Net­work demon­strat­ed just how pow­er­ful tok­enized radio cov­er­age could be, and a host of oth­er com­pa­nies are rolling out wire­less net­works, from WiFi to satel­lite to cell, using token incen­tives. GEODNET is one of those companies.

GEODNET allows you to set up a Hyfix Base Sta­tion in order to improve GPS accu­ra­cy. Most of us think of GPS as both accu­rate, “You have arrived at your des­ti­na­tion”, and infal­li­ble, “I don’t need direc­tions, I’ll just plug in your address to my GPS.”

Those tend to be true for find­ing your way to Paleo Treats, or Aunt Martha out in Mon­tana, which require accu­ra­cy to with­in a few meters. If, how­ev­er, you want accu­ra­cy down to the cen­time­ter, you’ll have to lev­el up your game. That’s what GEODNET is building. 

GEODNET stands for Glob­al Earth Obser­va­tion Decen­tral­ized NET­work, and it com­bines the idea of a blockchain with a CORS Net­work. I’ll explain what that means and how the whole sys­tem works fur­ther down the post. Before we get into the details of that, let me give you a quick walk­through on the prac­ti­cal aspects of what you’ll need to do to par­tic­i­pate and earn in the GEODNET network. 

• Roof with a clear view all around for the antenna
• Sta­ble WiFi (no Eth­er­net option yet)
• A place to put the min­er indoors

Sim­ple, right? You buy a station/miner from Hyfix, wait for ’em to ship (which can take a while, but we Heli­um types are used to that), then here’s what you get in the box:

Pull all that out, put it togeth­er, then mount it on your roof and you’ve added to what’s called an RTK net­work, but I’m get­ting ahead of myself. Let’s start with what my set­up looks like, then I’ll walk you through why I did what I did. Yes, it’s on the same pole as a Heli­um Hotspot.

First, you’ll need access to a roof with a clear view of the sky all around. Build­ings, trees, and hills that block that clear view will cause a prob­lem. Want “clear view” defined? Mea­sure an angle from 10º and above in a cir­cle around where you think you’ll deploy this anten­na. If there is any­thing sol­id in that path above 10º, you don’t have a clear view.

For most of us who’ve deployed Heli­um min­ers out­doors, this is pret­ty easy to accom­plish. A stan­dard non-pen­e­trat­ing roof mount with a 10–20′ pole in it, and the anten­na mount­ed at the top of that pole will do the trick. There are, how­ev­er, a few caveats. 

First, due to the accu­ra­cy required, GEODNET rec­om­mends that your anten­na be sta­ble to the mil­lime­ter. Yes, that means your anten­na should­n’t move more than a mil­lime­ter in any direc­tion when “strong force” is applied. I used a 10′ pole (1.75″ .095 4130 from Com­pet­i­tive Met­als in El Cajon) instead of my usu­al 20′+, with tough plas­tic wedg­ing the pole into the roof mount base so it would­n’t move. 

Sec­ond, if you’re going to pur­sue “dual min­ing” (both Heli­um & GEOD on one pole), I’m rec­om­mend­ing a longer mount­ing bolt than the one GEODNET sup­plies, which is 12″ long. The longer mount­ing bolt (I used a 36″ long 5/8–11 from my local Lowe’s, or you can order one from Ama­zon) gives ver­ti­cal sep­a­ra­tion between your Heli­um anten­na (in my case, the HNTen­na) and the sup­plied GNSS anten­na. While there’s a low like­li­hood of inter­fer­ence between the two, I fig­ure for an extra $8 I might as well make a clean install. I attached every­thing with hose clamps. Love ’em or hate ’em, they sure make things easy.

Third, you may, as I did, need a longer cable than the sup­plied 10m one to reach from the anten­na down to the min­er. The sup­plied cable was labeled “SYV-50–3 Jumper”. 

If I’m under­stand­ing that cor­rect­ly, that’s equiv­a­lent to RG-58. At the sup­plied length of 10m (~33′) it would have a loss of 7.2 dB at 1575 MHz, which is the pri­ma­ry fre­quen­cy used. I cut the cable open just to see what it looked like inside. It had a strand­ed core, thin insu­la­tion, and thin shielding.

I used LMR240 (just because I had enough of it to make the run) and made a 50′ cable with the appro­pri­ate con­nec­tors (TNC male and SMA male) for my set­up. That intro­duces ~5.6 dB of loss into the equa­tion if we’re assum­ing a 1575 MHz fre­quen­cy. The LMR240 has a sol­id core, thick­er shield­ing, and thick­er insu­la­tion. It is stiffer and very slight­ly thick­er. The gen­er­al take­away here (thanks @Kartuc on Dis­cord!) is to aim for 6 dB or less of cable loss. 

The rest of set up is just run­ning cables and fol­low­ing the direc­tions from GEODNET, which you can find here for the min­er.

Then you’ll need to set up your GEODNET account using the “Quick Guide” found on their Dis­cord and add your new­ly set up min­er to your GEODNET account. 

Ok, we’ve now got a GEODNET MobileCM™ Base Sta­tion set up. Want to know the details of how this thing works and real­ly, what it does? Let’s dive in!

I’m going to intro­duce some vocab­u­lary that might be new to you (it was to me) that’ll help you under­stand what this whole thing is, and why it’s useful. 

GNSS — Glob­al Nav­i­ga­tion Satel­lite Sys­tem: This includes many kinds of satel­lite-based posi­tion­ing sys­tems.
GPS — Glob­al Posi­tion­ing Sys­tem: One type of GNSS,
CORS — Con­tin­u­ous­ly Oper­at­ing Ref­er­ence Sta­tion
RTK — Real Time Kine­mat­ic: A “cor­rec­tion stream” of data com­ing from an Earth­side sta­tion to improve the accu­ra­cy of GNSS data.
Base Sta­tion — A known sta­t­ic Earth­side loca­tion that receives satel­lite data, then trans­mits a cor­rec­tion data stream over the inter­net.
Rover — Any device that receives GNSS sig­nals from a mobile plat­form. This is what most of would call “our GPS”.

Here’s the short­est way an engi­neer would describe this: A GEODNET MobileCM Base Sta­tion con­tributes to a CORS net­work of RTK base sta­tions improv­ing GNSS accuracy. 

Sep­tren­trio has done an excel­lent job explain­ing the details of GNSS over here.

The rea­son­ably short ver­sion is that the satel­lites we use for GPS are basi­cal­ly fly­ing clocks that trav­el known orbits, emit­ting reg­u­lar sig­nals. If you remem­ber back to high school math, know­ing where and when some­thing is and how fast the sig­nals it emits are trav­el­ing, one *should* be able to cal­cu­late where you are based on the time it takes to receive those sig­nals. Relax, no one is going to make you DO that math.

How­ev­er, a few inter­fer­ing fac­tors like space weath­er, atmos­pher­ic dis­tur­bances, and “mul­ti-path” reflec­tion of the satel­lite sig­nal off build­ings or oth­er obstruc­tions can intro­duce errors to accu­ra­cy by chang­ing the sig­nal path from satel­lite to your receiver,

What you’re doing when you set up a GEODNET is adding a ref­er­ence point that improves accu­ra­cy. It “lis­tens for” (receives) satel­lite data and reports back through the inter­net about when it heard that data. This allows for com­plex cal­cu­la­tions to be done that, in essence, say some­thing like:

“Hey, the Gris­tle King sta­tion heard a sig­nal from Satel­lite XYZ a few sec­onds late. That prob­a­bly means there’s some­thing going on with a solar flare or mul­ti-path or atmos­pher­ic inter­fer­ence that delayed the sig­nal between Satel­lite XYZ and the GK sta­tion. Let’s go ahead and adjust for that dis­tur­bance for any receivers near the Gris­tle King station.”

Since a fixed point on the ground does­n’t move, hav­ing a base sta­tion cre­ates a known ref­er­ence point for cal­cu­la­tions made between satel­lites and receivers else­where on the earth.

Ide­al­ly you’ve got a net­work of sta­tions all report­ing, which allows for the Gris­tle King sta­tion in San Diego to be ref­er­enced against sta­tions in near­by towns like La Mesa, or cities like Tijua­na or Los Ange­les. As we get more sta­tions online, the data gets more and more accu­rate. Here’s what the map looks like today, May 28th, 2022.

How accu­rate can you get? With the right set­up, and sta­tions approx­i­mate­ly 10 km apart, accu­ra­cy can be cal­cu­lat­ed down to the cen­time­ter! That starts to get super use­ful if you’re plant­i­ng crops and want to put your seeds in the right place, or you’re doing aer­i­al pho­tog­ra­phy, UAV (drone) nav­i­ga­tion, hydro­graph­ic sur­veys, or you just want to know where that scoot­er is that you’re sup­posed to be jump­ing on.

Ok, so all that’s cool, but, uh, how do I get paid?

Just like every oth­er wire­less blockchain project, you get paid for the data you pro­duce. There is an ini­tial peri­od for ear­ly adopters where as long as you have a min­er up, you’ll get paid just to keep it online & work­ing. As of late May 2022, all reg­is­tered sta­tions receive 2 GEODs (the token) per hour. I’m assum­ing that is high­er than we’ll get as more sta­tions join, and at some point we’ll switch over to the white paper equa­tion for Proof of Accu­ra­cy (PoA). Pay­ment will then be based on sig­nal qual­i­ty, the num­ber of sig­nals received, uptime, and the loca­tion of your miner. 

The total amount of tokens avail­able comes from the token sup­ply equa­tion, which is also in the white paper.

For an in depth expla­na­tion of those equa­tions and their vari­ables, check out the white paper. If you’d like a quick overview of the ini­tial GEODNET reward sys­tem, take a look at this:

GEOD tokens are cur­rent­ly on Poly­gon, though they’re aim­ing to switch to their own blockchain at some point. I’ve been receiv­ing my tokens reg­u­lar­ly, though it took a day or two for the flow to start. 

Frequently Asked Questions

These are pulled from the AMAs that GEODNET has been doing and a user/ambassador named Rou­ven has been com­pil­ing. Rou­ven is a vol­un­teer and runs a Face­book group in sup­port of GEODNET. He’s on Twit­ter & Insta­gram as well, fol­low him there if you want to stay up to date. These are NOT my ques­tions nor answers, though I have edit­ed some of them for eas­i­er reading.

Location Questions

How will GEODNET avoid/control sat­u­ra­tion? If two min­ers are with­in 10km, the first min­er online and sta­ble will see a high­er por­tion of the rewards. Basi­cal­ly, any min­ers with­in 10 km of each oth­er are treat­ed as the same min­er split­ting rewards. In gen­er­al, every­one read­ing this memo (April 15th, 2022) is ear­ly and should prob­a­bly not wor­ry so much unless they are less than 5 km from anoth­er sta­tion. Even then, being ear­ly means rewards lev­els are high accord­ing to halv­ing sched­ule. A year or so from now, a new entrant comes in very near­by to anoth­er sta­tion, they can be a bit more con­cerned. The cur­rent “cohort” is very early.

When can I see the 20 km cells on the map? Ear­ly May of 2022 was the prediction.

Can I move my min­er to a dif­fer­ent loca­tion? Yes, it will hap­pen auto­mat­i­cal­ly if you move, but…be aware when you’re offline, the online met­ric will be impact­ed, and if you vacate a spot you lose your senior­i­ty at that spot.

Token & Rewards Questions

When will the token be list­ed on exchanges? The real­is­tic time frame is prob­a­bly end of 2022.

What is the plan for the vot­ing structure/method of the Geo­DAO? Vot­ing pow­er will be pro­por­tion­al to staked tokens. 50% major­i­ty for nor­mal deci­sions, 2/3 major­i­ty for big decisions.

Will there be any “pro­tec­tion” for ear­ly adopters? Total uptime met­ric will pro­vide an Advan­tage to the ear­ly adopter who main­tains sta­tion in a loca­tion consistently.

What are esti­mat­ed rewards per day? This depend on qual­i­ty of instal­la­tion, loca­tion, up-time and # of satel­lites seen. A good instal­la­tion should earn +/-30 tokens per day in year 1, with a halv­ing planned for year 2.

Will the token be on its own blockchain even­tu­al­ly? Yes. It will start on Poly­gon to make it eas­i­er for every­one, but we are work­ing on devel­op­ing our own blockchain like Heli­um, with our own proof of loca­tion protocol.

Why is there a need for a new blockchain when there are so many fast, “green”, and low fee blockchains? We are devel­op­ing a new con­sen­sus pro­to­col that imple­ments secure, anony­mous proof of loca­tion. This would be dif­fi­cult / expen­sive to imple­ment as a Smart Con­tract on top of anoth­er chain. Fur­ther­more, if we use exter­nal blockchain, we will con­sume a lot of gas to oper­ate the ser­vice providers nodes and deploy broad use of the ser­vice itself. If we use our own chain, this val­ue instead con­sol­i­dates back to the GEOD token which is good for the token holders.

Hardware & Setup Questions

Will oth­er anten­nas (like Heli­um) cause inter­fer­ence? Heli­um anten­nas should not be a prob­lem. Major LTE or TV tow­ers will cause inter­fer­ence, try and keep away from them. [Nik’s com­ment: The dis­tance to keep away is not defined, though in oth­er Q&A’s they say that cell com­pa­nies often add GNSS anten­nas to their own tow­er. Ver­ti­cal stand­off is prob­a­bly the best way to man­age this.]

What are the main­te­nance require­ments? Min­i­mal, you’ll most­ly have prob­lems with local area net­work or pow­er issues.

What anten­na cable should I use? We ship with LMR400 and it is okay to 15m or so (we ship 10m). LMR600 is real­ly the best cables but heavy. Use LMR600 if need for >15m. If using LMR400 cable, the cable could be extend­ed anoth­er 30m or more. [Nik’s com­ment: I did not receive LMR400 with my unit, and I used 50′ of LMR240. I’m not sure how much dif­fer­ence this will make.]

Dur­ing the win­ter sea­son, will snow on the anten­na influ­ence the satel­lite accu­ra­cy? What about bird poop or dust? You do not need to try to clear the unit off. We have a unit in north­ern Nor­way with a lot of snow on it dur­ing Feb­ru­ary, and the sig­nals were still very good. Poop and dust are trans­par­ent for RF. If the sig­nal qual­i­ty real­ly goes down, you will be able to see this on the Con­sole soon and then you could decide to clear the snow. GNSS fre­quen­cies are in the 1 – 1.5GHz range which is a long ways from ~2.4GHz where atten­u­a­tion due to mois­ture is much big­ger issue.

Will these units over­heat and shut­down if the temps get too high? Not like­ly, as it would need to get up in the 70C realm to overheat.

Where I am [local reg­u­la­tions] require bond­ing & ground­ing of the anten­na. The kit does­n’t come with com­po­nents to address this. You can add a light­en­ing pro­tec­tor before the MobileCM SMA to pro­tect HYFIX unit from light­en­ing surge if you want. If the build­ing has a ground strap/point then you can add a strap to con­nect from the TNC of the anten­nae to the build­ing ground strap.

Can I run one of these off grid? Yes, you’ll need a 4G con­nec­tion in addi­tion to solar pan­els and a battery.

Is there a safe lim­it of wind speed for the anten­na to be exposed? How sta­ble does it need to be? There is a glob­al sta­tion in Patag­o­nia where the winds are quite reg­u­lar­ly 100km/hr. The anten­nae itself is not impact­ed by wind, but if you are in a high-wind loca­tion secure it extreme­ly well. The gen­er­al rule of thumb is that the anten­nae mount can hold your body weight! Mil­lime­ters of motion mat­ter, the more secure the better.

What anten­na does the GEODNET ship with?
The GEODNET ships with an SK6618 from Shsi­ki, you can find more on that here. When I got the chance to talk with GEODNET founder Mike, he was con­fi­dent this was one of the best anten­nas on the mar­ket, and that, unlike Heli­um, you prob­a­bly would­n’t get any notice­able improve­ment with an upgrad­ed antenna. 

Business Development & Use Questions

Will I be able to get some local weath­er data from my min­er in dash­board and maybe a weath­er pre­dic­tion? You will be able to visu­al­ize your own min­ers satel­lite vis­i­bil­i­ty and sig­nals quite quick­ly (by June). Even­tu­al­ly we can build a big­ger pic­ture and you will be able to see region­al ground motion (such as plate move­ments), and the real-time Glob­al Views of the ionos­phere, like this one.

What’s are the require­ments for becom­ing a device vendor/maker? Is there a device cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process in place to make new mak­ers enter­ing the mar­ket to ad here to cer­tain data/reception/compliance stan­dards? GEODNET is now active­ly work­ing with a tru­ly third par­ty GNSS mak­er with no pri­or rela­tion­ship to any GEODNET team mem­ber. This will pave the way to pub­lish a good inde­pen­dent process, and GEODNET wel­comes new min­er mak­ers. If there are oth­er inter­est­ed par­ties feel free to reach out thru the GEODNET web­site. We are not ready to open­ly pub­lish the process yet, but can share it to qual­i­fied groups under NDA.

Who are the poten­tial buy­ers of Geod­net data, and are there any deals already? Yes, we have one deal in place already (Ag ori­ent­ed sup­pli­er Hemi­sphere GNSS) and in dis­cus­sion with a 2nd com­pa­ny. We will also like­ly intro­duce self-ser­vice por­tal for indi­vid­ual users such as Drone Sur­vey and tra­di­tion­al sur­vey. Poten­tial buy­ers might come from sur­vey, farm­ing, con­struc­tion, map­ping, autonomous vehi­cles, IoT appli­ca­tions like eScoot­er, blockchain apps for anony­mous Proof of Loca­tion and Proof of Time.

Can the GEODNET base sta­tions pro­vide ref­er­ence data for pri­vate, encrypt­ed, low orbit GNSS satel­lites like the Xona Pul­sar satel­lites, or is the focus and the hard­ware lim­it­ed exclu­sive­ly on open medi­um orbit GNSS satel­lites? We are look­ing into LEO satel­lites. [Nik’s note: LEO = Low Earth Orbit]. I will reach out to Xona this week to dis­cuss with them. We know Xona team well, and they have expressed sup­port for GEODNET fol­low­ing its ini­tial pre­sen­ta­tion in ION 2021. In the future, it would be ide­al if GEODNET com­mu­ni­ty can actu­al­ly oper­ate some Xona or sim­i­lar LEO satel­lites to pro­vide more decen­tral­iza­tion and capability.

How would the GEOD Net­work uti­lize the Heli­um net­work as you men­tioned a PCI slot for upgrad­ing the min­er? GEODNET net­work can use Heli­um to send GNSS cor­rec­tion down­stream. The GEODNET min­ers are gath­er­ing the Space Weath­er data, but ulti­mate­ly that data or a processed vari­ant of the data must be sent to the “Rover/Mobile” GPS/GNSS, as that is the “thing” that needs an accu­rate posi­tion. This is nor­mal­ly done over 4G/LTE or in some cas­es on a low-data rate satel­lite chan­nel called L‑band. L‑band is very slow and requires excel­lent sky vis­i­bil­i­ty. Heli­um is a good alter­na­tive as the data is cheap, and the avail­abil­i­ty is wide spread. The Heli­um net­work would ben­e­fit great­ly from this use case as GNSS cor­rec­tions are rel­a­tive­ly data inten­sive com­pared to many of the sim­pler LoraWAN appli­ca­tions. Nor­mal­ly it requires 300bits/sec to 1kb/set more or less continuously.

Is any API avail­able to inter­act with the Geod­net con­sole or to retrieve infor­ma­tion about my min­er? Not at this time, but we will do it even­tu­al­ly when we have a larg­er team to han­dle an API.

Can we host a Glob­al Base and run a min­er? [Nik’s note: A Glob­al base is a larg­er unit and dif­fer­ent than a stan­dard GEOD min­er.] YES. This is fine and not a bad idea. An RF split­ter can be used. We still need more Glob­al Base Loca­tions but not so much in cen­tral Europe. Africa, Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, Cen­tral Asia, North­ern Japan and Remote Island Loca­tions are high­ly desired.

How will coor­di­nates of the anten­na will be cal­cu­lat­ed? The coor­di­nates are con­tin­u­ous­ly com­put­ed. GNSS sta­tions are used to detect and track coastal tide motion as well as plate tec­ton­ic shifts. This is one of their big ben­e­fits. If the sta­tion is moved this is self-detect­ed; how­ev­er, it will also neg­a­tive­ly impact the sta­tions rewards for a while. So before offi­cial min­ing starts, place your sta­tion in a loca­tion that is sta­ble and won’t require relocation.

Is the secu­ri­ty of the GNSS data in the blockchain guar­an­teed? Can a nation-state force GEODNET to release the data for your pur­pos­es and mis­use it or is this secured? This is a tricky and real­ly great ques­tion. In short term GEODENT will have a cen­tral­ized token issuance scheme on Poly­gon, so I think if the “FBI comes knock­ing” there is not much we could do but “help”. Lat­er when GEODNET runs its own GEODNET chain … then the net­work it is more ful­ly decen­tral­ized. GEODNET then will be bet­ter pro­tect­ed from such poten­tial abuse

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That should answer most of your ques­tions. If you want to order a min­er you can do so here.

Hit me up in the com­ments with any­thing else and I’ll respond or update this post as need­ed. GEOD on!

Resources

• ORDER A GEODNET base sta­tion min­er
  GEODNET Github Whitepaper
• GEODNET Web­site
• GEODNET Con­sole
• GEODNET Whitepa­per Pre­sen­ta­tion

A quick word on the links in this blog post. Some of them are affil­i­ate links, which will take you to a site that pays me a small com­mis­sion on sales. There is no extra cost to you, and those com­mis­sions help keep the lights on here in Gristle-land.