Gristle King - A Guide to DePIN

What’s The Best Antenna For Your Helium Hotspot?

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by

Nik
in

Here is a step by step method for under­stand­ing how to choose the best anten­na for your hotspot place­ment. Each place­ment demands a well matched anten­na in order to pro­vide val­ue to the Heli­um Net­work and con­se­quent­ly earn the most HNT pos­si­ble for that loca­tion. Do NOT, by the way, try to get the giant anten­na in the pic­ture below. While it looks huge and cool and rad, it is the wrong anten­na to use for these deploy­ments. I spent a fair amount of blood and trea­sure to learn that les­son. You don’t need to. 

First: Hotspot place­ment opti­miza­tion is FAR more impor­tant than what anten­na you use, more on that here.

High Mountain antenna placement for Helium in the backcountry of San Diego

Sec­ond, for those of you who just want AN ANSWER: Sim­ple: Pick from the McGill selec­tion. They’ll all work well. 

Put it out­doors at least 10′ above all the build­ings around you. Run 40′ or less of LMR400 cable to it from your hotspot. If you have to go more than 40′, use LMR600 if you’re feel­ing extrav­a­gant. That’ll prob­a­bly get you 80% of the results you could get with far more effort and expertise. 

Wait, you want to actu­al­ly learn and match your anten­na to your sit­u­a­tion so you get the max­i­mum rewards possible?

Ok, let’s start with broad strokes: The anten­na you choose for your hotspot place­ment should match your topog­ra­phy, your ele­va­tion, and your lines of sight.

Let’s start with topog­ra­phy. Topog­ra­phy refers to the build­ings, earth, and water that sur­round, chan­nel, and block your radio sig­nals (prop­a­ga­tion.) The top­ic of radio prop­a­ga­tion involves a tremen­dous­ly deep dive all the way down to the fun­da­men­tals of physics, but we’ll keep it pret­ty simple.

BLUF (Bot­tom Line Up Front) — The flat­ter your topog­ra­phy AND the more trees/vegetation you have block­ing your Line of Sight to oth­er hotspots, the high­er gain anten­na you can use, up to 9 dbi.

Remem­ber, topog­ra­phy isn’t just hills and moun­tains, it includes build­ings, trees, and oth­er obstacles. 

Ok, let’s get dirty! In gen­er­al, earth in the form of moun­tains or hills will block radio sig­nals. Even though a hotspot may seem very close to you, if there’s a hill between the two of you, you prob­a­bly won’t wit­ness each other.

You may check out your loca­tion on the Heli­um Explor­er Cov­er­age map and think you’re per­fect­ly posi­tioned in regards to near­by hotspots, like this:

Remem­ber to check Google Earth!

See how that spot is tucked into a bunch of hills? Unless you put up an anten­na that’ll stick over the top of the hills, you’re restrict­ed to wit­ness­ing only oth­er hotspots in your imme­di­ate area, and in this case, that area is small!

One of the best tools to use when assess­ing a new site is Heli­umVi­sion. Remem­ber, loca­tion is FAR more impor­tant than anten­nas. If you’d like to learn more about Heli­umVi­sion (I use it in every one of my con­sults) I’ve built a Mas­ter Class on it, over here.

Ok, so that’s earth. Earth = No Radio Waves Get­ting Through.

What about build­ings? How much will build­ings block or reduce the pow­er of radio propagation? 

Accord­ing to a study done in 2012 on a wide swath of build­ing mate­ri­als and focus­ing on the GSM 900 MHz band, a rein­forced con­crete wall that is 20cm / ~8″ thick will atten­u­ate the sig­nal by 27 dB. An inte­ri­or plas­ter wall will reduce pow­er by any­where from .8 to 3 dB.

What does that mean? Dis­claimer: RF geeks, I’ma get loose with terms here. Relax.

This reduc­tion in pow­er is called “atten­u­a­tion.” In gen­er­al with radio com­mu­ni­ca­tions, you don’t want any atten­u­a­tion. Atten­u­a­tion can hap­pen with earth, build­ings, forests, and even win­dow coat­ings. How much pow­er will you lose? Let’s run some numbers.

Amer­i­can based hotspots start off by push­ing out 27 dBm. Euro­pean and oth­er areas start WAY low­er, at 14. Add the gain (dBi) from your anten­na and sub­tract the loss­es from any con­nec­tions to fig­ure out your Effec­tive Isotrop­ic Radi­at­ed Pow­er (EIRP).

That means a 6 dBi anten­na will give you 33 dBm of EIRP with a US hotspot. 27dBm + 6dBi = 33dBm in the direc­tion of anten­na gain. Now you’ve got to cal­cu­late cable and con­nec­tion loss.

As a rough rule of thumb, each con­nec­tion (hotspot to anten­na cable, anten­na cable to anten­na, or going through an enclo­sure wall using a con­nec­tor) will drop your EIRP by .5 dB. Cable loss­es vary by cable, which is why most peo­ple use a “low loss” cable like LMR400. If you want to run your EIRP num­bers, here’s how.

Ok, ok, ok, why does it mat­ter whether or not you know your EIRP? 

Let’s take a short detour into dBm and pow­er. dBm is based on a log­a­rith­mic scale. For every increase of 3 dBm, there is twice as much pow­er out­put. Every increase of 10 dBm has a ten­fold increase in pow­er. The dif­fer­ence between a 3 dBi anten­na (what most hotspots ship with) and an after­mar­ket 9 dBi anten­na is a fac­tor of 4! 

Of course, that 4x pow­er comes at a cost; the beam is focused; more laser and less light­bulb. That means that unless you aim your anten­na very care­ful­ly, you can blast all that pow­er into places that have no hotspots.

Here is a great exam­ple demon­strat­ing atten­u­a­tion and topog­ra­phy. This hotspot is placed on the north side inside a build­ing. It’s up high with a high­er gain anten­na, and in gen­er­al, inac­cu­rate­ly aimed over most of the near­by hotspots.

Most of the wit­ness­es it’s get­ting are fur­ther north. Some of the sig­nals bounce off to the side, prov­ing that “RF is weird.” 

To the south, the sig­nals are blocked or atten­u­at­ed by inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or walls, but appar­ent­ly there is a small win­dow or open­ing where those weak­ened sig­nals are escap­ing, then going pret­ty far over the water. Pret­ty neat, right? I mean, not for the hotspot own­er, but it’s a neat demon­stra­tion of the concept.

That image is also a great exam­ple of why you should nev­er put a hotspot anten­na inside; you are los­ing a ton of pow­er before the radio waves ever get out­side the building.

Water allows radio sig­nals to trav­el much fur­ther than nor­mal; look at any hotspot next to a body of water and you’ll see it will con­nect with oth­er hotspots at much fur­ther ranges across the water than it will across land. 

Let’s not get too into the weeds here. As I said at the begin­ning, the gen­er­al rule for topog­ra­phy is this: The flat­ter your topog­ra­phy, the high­er gain anten­na you can use, up to 9 dBi for 95% of place­ments. Beyond 9 the pat­tern gen­er­al­ly gets too pre­cise to pro­vide the Wide cov­er­age (the W in WUPU) that we want.

Remem­ber, topog­ra­phy includes not just hills, moun­tains, and water, but all the build­ings, bridges, and oth­er struc­tures that might block your radio sig­nal. Cities in gen­er­al do not have a flat topog­ra­phy, even if they’re built on flat land. All those spiky build­ings stick­ing out will gob­ble up your radio signals.

That brings us to ELEVATION. If you want to bend your mind a lit­tle bit, think about this: The high­er your ele­va­tion, the flat­ter the rel­a­tive topog­ra­phy is, and the LOWER dbi anten­na you can use. Wait, what?

Remem­ber, a high dbi anten­na focus­es the sig­nal of your anten­na. In an omni anten­na (we’ll get to direc­tion­al or sec­tor anten­nas in a minute), that shape becomes a flat­ter and flat­ter plane. If that plane is super flat, it’ll fly right over the tops of all those hotspots you want to hit. Let’s go through 3 examples.

Now, those aren’t how it *actu­al­ly* works. The gain pat­terns are nowhere near as dif­fer­ent, and a high gain anten­na will STILL hit the ground with­in 1,000′ of even a 100′ build­ing. Still, you can see why in *most* cas­es, you want a low or medi­um gain anten­na up high.

You can also run that idea back­wards; if you’re in a real­ly flat area where you don’t have a lot of obsta­cles, a high gain anten­na might be your best bet. Still, most peo­ple don’t live in the desert, and the flat­test state in Amer­i­ca has a ton of trees on it. If that’s your sce­nario, get a high gain (6–9 dBi) anten­na up over the tops of those trees for max­i­mum coverage. 

That brings us in a round­about way to Lines of Sight. Remem­ber that $39 paper I quot­ed ear­li­er regard­ing how much RF ener­gy a giv­en build­ing mate­r­i­al would absorb? The gen­er­al take­away for us Heli­um Hotspot own­ers is this: Our anten­nas won’t blast through much more than 2 build­ings.

That means if you’re INSIDE the build­ing, you’ve burned most of the ener­gy of the anten­na just get­ting out­side the walls. If it hits just one more “thing”, whether it’s a build­ing, a tree, or a bill­board, that’s prob­a­bly the end of the line.

This “Lines of Sight” idea has an impor­tant impli­ca­tion in under­stand­ing how some of the top earn­ing hotspot/antenna com­bos are doing so well. The hotspot Docile Bone Pony* (when this was writ­ten, one of the high­est earn­ers in the world) is on top of a 16 sto­ry build­ing in a major city with a medium/high gain anten­na (8 dbi from eBay on 60′ of LMR400.) It has Lines of Sight to a lot of oth­er hotspots, BUT those oth­er hotspots don’t have great lines of sight to oth­er hotspots around ’em.

That means that DBP is see­ing a lot of hotspots that AREN’T see­ing a lot of hotspots. I’m going to anthro­po­mor­phize this a bit, but their only option is to com­mu­ni­cate with DBP. So they do. And DBP earns like crazy. It’s an exam­ple of the incred­i­ble earn­ing poten­tial that exists when pro­vid­ing asym­met­ric val­ue to the network.

While we’re on Lines of Sight, let’s talk about the range of a stan­dard hotspot. Accord­ing to some excel­lent work done by the inim­itable @para1 on Dis­cord, most hotspots do most of their wit­ness­ing with­in a 10km range. Now, an in depth dis­cus­sion of the impli­ca­tions and restric­tions of this table is beyond the scope of this arti­cle, but your gen­er­al take­away should be “Opti­mize your anten­na for hot­pots with­in 10 km” aka most peo­ple don’t need a high gain antenna.

@para1’s table, post­ed in Discord

I’ll dou­ble tap this range thing with an exam­ple of a hotspot I run, which has a 3 dBi HNTen­na on top of a 20′ pole on top of a ~30′ build­ing. It *rou­tine­ly* gets wit­ness­es over 200km away. While it seems that a high gain anten­na will get you bet­ter range, it does­n’t real­ly mat­ter. It’s Line of Sight that is the secret here.

Final­ly, Lines of Sight can be blocked by forests. Depend­ing on who you lis­ten to, LoRa does­n’t go through much more than 60 meters of dense for­est. I’m sor­ry rur­al Flori­da, you’ve just got a tough row to hoe on that one. Dense for­est in between you and oth­er anten­nas is about the only time a high­er gain (up to 9 dBi) makes sense, and even then it may not make a giant dif­fer­ence. Forests are RF sinks.

There is one more thing to think about with Lines of Sight. The 900 MHz fre­quen­cy needs some run­way, ide­al­ly 50′/15m to fan out enough to dif­fract around obsta­cles. Read that again and you’ll have an advan­tage over every­one who does­n’t get that concept.

The con­cept of Fres­nel zones and dif­frac­tion in radio wave com­mu­ni­ca­tion is one of the fun­da­men­tal dri­vers of the “RF is weird” refrain you’ll hear when­ev­er you see a pat­tern that does­n’t imme­di­ate­ly make sense. Basi­cal­ly, the fur­ther out your radio waves go, the more they can spread out along their radi­a­tion pat­tern, the less like­ly that all of the waves get blocked, and the more like­ly that at least some of ’em will get to anoth­er hotspot. 

At some dis­tance they’re so spread out that you’re basi­cal­ly not going to make a con­nec­tion, so the effec­tive “win­dow” shrinks back down. Like this:

Check out RadioMo­bile to get deep on Fres­nel zones.

If you set up your anten­na so that you’ve got lots of clear space around it before it hits obsta­cles, those radios waves have enough spread to start “bend­ing around” those obsta­cles. This is yet anoth­er rea­son not to set up inside. 

Here’s anoth­er “I def­i­nite­ly did­n’t go to art school” draw­ing to demon­strate the idea of run­way and diffraction.

If you give those radio waves some room to spread out, they can get around obsta­cles. Let ’em breathe!

Ok, we’ve got one more thing to con­sid­er before wrap­ping up. Many of you will have been scour­ing ham radio sites to fig­ure out how to improve the range of your anten­na. Keep in mind that the goal of many ham radio oper­a­tors is incred­i­ble range, but that can come at the cost of broad cov­er­age. Doing exact­ly what a ham oper­a­tor does may give you the results they want, not what you want.

YOU want to hit as many high scale hotspots as pos­si­ble. You’ll usu­al­ly do that by using a low gain anten­na up high, with clear lines of sight all around.

Remem­ber, you’ll earn the most by deliv­er­ing the most valu­able & prov­able cov­er­age to the net­work. The con­cept is sim­ple. The exe­cu­tion can be com­pli­cat­ed. If you want help with get­ting the max­i­mum val­ue out of your place­ments or strat­e­gy, I’m avail­able for hire.

For those of you who skipped all that and just want to know what anten­na to get, here are 4 gen­er­al­ly good options for the 3 most com­mon scenarios.

  1. In a build­ing in the city? Get an out­door HNTen­na or a McGill in the 3–6 dBi range, put it out­side up as high as you can.
  2. In a build­ing where you just can’t get up high? Use the stock anten­na that came with your hotspot. Also, find a bet­ter place­ment loca­tion. You did read about that, right?
  3. In a sub­ur­ban house? Get either the HNTen­na or a McGill in the 3–6 dBi range and put it on a pole out­side and up high.
  4. On a moun­tain where you can’t pos­si­ble trans­mit behind you (because the moun­tain will block your sig­nal) and you have an enor­mous view of civ­i­liza­tion and your near­est hotspot is more than 5 miles away? Try a 8–9 dBi patch anten­na, like these.

I’ll round this out with what to def­i­nite­ly NOT do. Don’t just look at the gain of an anten­na and think high­er is bet­ter. Don’t both­er with Yagi anten­nas. Final­ly, don’t wor­ry too much about your anten­na. In the big pic­ture of earn­ings, it is FAR more impor­tant to have good place­ment and ele­va­tion. The fan­ci­est, coolest, most high tech anten­na in the world won’t get you much if you’re in a crap­py loca­tion down low.

Best of luck with your place­ment and earn­ings, I’m stoked to be a part of this amaz­ing com­mu­ni­ty! If you’re look­ing for work in the Heli­um ecosys­tem, check out  Heli­um Jobs. You can post and find jobs there, help sup­port the ecosys­tem by mak­ing it eas­i­er to con­nect pro­fes­sion­al­ly, and let the world know that YOU exist and want to help con­tribute with­in the Net­work. Rock on!

Resources and Further Reading

A deep­er dive into under­stand­ing how RF works.

Cal­cu­lat­ing RF Pow­er Val­ues (explains why a 6 dBi anten­na dou­bles your power)

900 MHz: The Wire­less Work­horse. (Prob­a­bly why Heli­um chose LoRa)

List of Helium Hotspots & Their Antennas

Before you read this and assume that you must have a high gain anten­na in order to get great earn­ings, please keep in mind that these hotspot own­ers are gen­er­al­ly tin­ker­ers and often have some exper­tise in RF the­o­ry. The results are a lit­tle skewed because of that.

UPDATE: Heli­umVi­sion now reports this for all hotspot own­ers who have entered this on Heli­um app. I’ve closed sub­mis­sions on this page. 

Docile Bone Pony — Ele­va­tion: 16 sto­ries, Area: Greater Boston, MA. Anten­na: 8 dbi omni from eBay, Cables: 60′ of LMR400

Sweet Sage Pike — Ele­va­tion: 43′ above ground, Area: San Diego, CA. Anten­na: Near­son 9, Cables: 5′ of LMR400

Chilly Blood Mon­goose — Ele­va­tion: 41′ above ground, Area: San Diego, CA. Anten­na: Laird FG9026 (6 dbi), Cables: 5′ of LMR400

Lucky Men­thol Wasp — Ele­va­tion: 60′ above ground, Area: San Diego, CA. Anten­na: RAK 5.8 dbi, Cables: 11′ LMR400

Nice Lip­stick Chim­panzee — Ele­va­tion: 25′ above ground, Area: San Fran­cis­co, CA. Anten­na: RFMAX | ROSA-900-SNF, Cables: 5′ LMR240

Inter­est­ing Pearl Star­ling — Ele­va­tion: 35′ above ground, Area: North Shore, MA. Anten­na: RAK 5.8 dbi, Cables: RAK pig­tail inter­face con­vert­er bun­dled with antenna

Jumpy Iron Fer­ret — Ele­va­tion: 34th sto­ry, Area: Chica­go, IL. Anten­na: Stock, Cables: N/A. Indoor setup.

Kind Infrared Lynx — Ele­va­tion: 15′ above ground, Area: Den­ver, CO. Anten­na: Tao­glas 8 dbi. Cables: 15′ LMR400

Lucky Dijon Scal­lop — Ele­va­tion: 33′ above ground. Area: Engle­wood, CO. Anten­na: RAK 8 dbi. Cables: RAK pig­tail cable

Sticky Pear Dol­phin — Ele­va­tion: 311′ above ground (moun­tain). Area: San Fran­cis­co, CA. Anten­na: Oukeione 3 dbi. Cables: Bingfu

Petite Men­thol Leop­ard — Ele­va­tion 25′. Area: Napa, CA. Anten­na: 5.8 RAK. Cables: Bingfu

Best Tan­ger­ine Racoon — Ele­va­tion: Sec­ond Floor Win­dow. Area: Bay­onne, NJ Anten­na: Stock 3 dBi Cables: 1m pigtail

Warm Juniper Pan­ther — Ele­va­tion: 4th floor rooftop. Area: Bay­onne, NJ Anten­na: Near­son 9 dBi. Cables: 4′ LMR400

Scrawny Egg­plant Pan­da — Ele­va­tion: 35′ Area: Lake­wood, OH Anten­na 4 dBi Mul­ti­pole Cables: N/A

Ancient Cider Grasshop­per — Ele­va­tion: 40′ Area: Kansas City, MO Anten­na: RAK Wire­less 8 dBi Cables: 30′ LMR400

Oblong Slate Platy­pus — Ele­va­tion: 400′ Area: New York City, NY Anten­na: Prox­i­cast 10 dBi Cables: LMR400

Ripe Banana Gob­lin — Ele­va­tion: 2nd floor win­dow Area: Van­cou­ver, BC Anten­na: Stock 3 dBi Cables: N/A

Trendy Rain­bow Lizard — Ele­va­tion: 1st floor win­dow Area: Van­cou­ver, BC Anten­na: Stock 3 dBi Cables: N/A

Striped Pewter Osprey — Ele­va­tion: 20′ Area: Los Ange­les, CA Anten­na: RAk 5.8 Cables: LMR400

Comments

491 responses to “What’s The Best Antenna For Your Helium Hotspot?”

  1. Matt B. Avatar
    Matt B.

    Not an option but appre­ci­ate your feed back. Austin Tx is a bit too dense with min­ers to find a “bet­ter” loca­tion . Were in the out­skirts of town now so the goal is just to reach fur­ther dis­tances. What anten­na does best for that ?

  2. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    A stan­dard RAK 5.8 from Par­ley Labs or the HNTen­na will do fine with clear line of sight.

  3. Matt B. Avatar
    Matt B.

    Thanks Nik, I can’t believe how many replies you’ve got on here! Do you have any mate­r­i­al on under­stand­ing the need, if any, to ground these anten­nas out­side on poles or in our case, a roof?
    Like, am I going to get hit by light­ning and get the house burnt down?

  4. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Well, tech­ni­cal­ly you should ground every anten­na, though it’s usu­al­ly more to pro­tect your device from sta­t­ic dis­charge and less about preventing/stopping a light­ning strike. If you look at most anten­nas on build­ings (not just Heli­um ones) you’ll see that plen­ty of them aren’t ground­ed. If your anten­na is eas­i­ly the high­est thing around and you have light­ning storms reg­u­lar­ly I’d be more wor­ried about it. Again, tech­ni­cal­ly you should, in prac­tice many don’t.

  5. Rene bartum Avatar
    Rene bartum

    Thanks Nik for the great arti­cle! I was brought here by youtu­ber Anony­mous Miner.
    I live in a city called Ocala, Flori­da. The city itself is pret­ty small con­sid­er­ing Orlan­do, Flori­da is about 1 hour away. I used https://www.scadacore.com/ to help find ele­va­tions and line of sight. (Again thank you for all the infor­ma­tion you placed above) I have 2 questions…
    1) The goal is get to the high­est ele­va­tion pos­si­ble with no obstruc­tion around?
    2) There’s prob­a­bly a total of 10 hotspots in my area (com­pared to over 200+ in Orlan­do) Does the num­ber of hotspots of wit­ness­es reflect the amount of coins earned?

  6. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Yes to 1. For 2, less than 40 hotspots makes it hard­er to reli­ably wit­ness enough bea­cons to earn con­sis­tent­ly at high­er rates. You earn more per wit­nessed bea­con with less min­ers, but there are less oppor­tu­ni­ties to wit­ness beacons.

  7. Johnny Avatar
    Johnny

    Hey gris­tle! I final­ly got my anten­na up with 21 foot of lmr 400 and the HNTen­na. 3dbi you rec­om­mend­ed. I report­ed the dbi in the app account­ing for the loss for the cable but not the arrester( anoth­er .4? I assume ). Is it detri­men­tal if I don’t change it. I was always curi­ous if what will hap­pen if you report in the app incor­rect­ly. Thank you !

  8. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi John­ny, right on! I would­n’t wor­ry too much about a loss of .4.

  9. Thorsten Avatar
    Thorsten

    Hi Nik,
    great sum­ma­ry. Thanks a lot for that.
    I wan­na buy your rec­om­mend­ed Anten­na for out­door on top of build­ings (num­ber 1 on your list). But this one is only for USA and Cana­da. Do you have by instance a rec­om­men­da­tion for Europe?

    Greet­ings from Ger­many, Mate.

  10. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Thorsten, HNTen­na makes a Euro ver­sion, here. 🙂

  11. Perceival Avatar
    Perceival

    Hi Nik,
    My coun­try is oper­at­ing at AS923_1, zone3. Will the “USA/CAN (915) 902–928MHz White Out­door Heli­um Anten­na” work in my area?
    Thanks, appre­ci­ate your help.

  12. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Per­ceival, looks like that freq plan sup­ports dif­fer­ent bands; what coun­try are you in?

  13. Ivan Avatar
    Ivan

    Hel­lo Nik,

    Thank you very much for pub­lish­ing this. It is very good to under­stand bet­ter what we are sup­posed to achieve, i nev­er had con­tact with info about radio waves and anten­nas and they are fascinating!
    I was look­ing the oth­er day at some cel­lu­lar tow­ers, and they look like to use many direc­tion­al anten­nas to achieve the 360 degree cov­er­age. I’m on the high­est floor of a 350′ build­ing with access to the roof, do you think I would ben­e­fit from this kind of set­up? Is it pos­si­ble to use mul­ti­ple anten­nas on the heli­um network?

    Thank you very much for your time!

  14. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Ivan,
    Hap­py to help! I haven’t yet seen a work­ing Heli­um set­up with mul­ti­ple anten­nas. Lots of folks have tried it, but it’s gen­er­al­ly far more com­pli­cat­ed and a PITA than just set­ting up an omni­di­rec­tion­al and get­ting the thing high.

  15. Ivan Avatar
    Ivan

    Thank you for your reply Nik!

    Sure, they indeed look very com­pli­cat­ed. I bought the Ris­ingHF RHF2S308 hotspot with 8dbi anten­na, I will try to use it stock, do you think i would ben­e­fit from using the Omni­di­rec­tion­al https://hntenna.com?

    Thanks again and have a great day!

  16. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Depends on where you are. In the EU and oth­er low­er-pow­er-radio zones, a high­er gain can real­ly help. In the US, in gen­er­al, the low­er gain anten­nas like the HNTen­na will do real­ly well.

  17. John Avatar
    John

    Hey Gris! I got decent min­ers around me. Some right next to me. And oth­ers 3–4 min­er block spaces away. I live in an apart­ment on the bot­tom floor. Do you have any rec­om­men­da­tion of where to put the anten­na ? And what dbi to run. Im the US. Semi pop­u­lat­ed area. I was think­ing of putting it right out­side, hang­ing it right above my porch. Thank you

  18. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi John,
    Yeah, get it out­side and as high as possible.

  19. Jackson Avatar
    Jackson

    Thanks for the great arti­cle. Is the goal to get as many wit­ness­es as pos­si­ble? If two min­ers are both earn­ing the 1.00 reward scale would 100 wit­ness­es do worst than one that wit­ness­es 190? Would a high­er wit­ness count mean that the anten­na is cor­rect­ly being uti­lized for the typog­ra­phy that we are in. We are cur­rent­ly test­ing 8dbi, 12dbi and 16dbi, all out­side about 10m off the ground.

  20. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Jack­son, no, a bea­con can only be wit­nessed by 10 oth­er hotspots. If more than 10 hotspots wit­ness that bea­con, 10 are ran­dom­ly selected.

  21. Vladimir Avatar
    Vladimir

    Hel­lo Nik,

    thank you for all the infor­ma­tion you share with us.

    Is a VSWR: ?1.63 ok for a 5 dbi antenna?
    https://store.rakwireless.com/products/5dbi-fiber-glass-antenna-supports-863–870mhz?variant=40024050270406

    Thank you!

  22. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Yep, any­thing under 2 is fine.

  23. Phil Avatar
    Phil

    Hi Gris­tle, I live in a very rur­al area with very few hotspots, my min­er should be here any day now
    I am in the UK with the clos­est big group of hotspots with­in line of site are about 90km away across the sea. I’m 150m above sea-lev­el with the anten­na loca­tion 10m above that. Would a direc­tion­al anten­na be bet­ter for me

  24. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Phil, whew, those are big dis­tances for the EU. Yep, I’d prob­a­bly go direc­tion­al, at least until PoCv11 comes online.

  25. johnny Avatar
    johnny

    Hey gris­tle, hope you been well. Set­ting up anoth­er hotspot next week at anoth­er bud­dies house. Its up on a hill, pret­ty decent view under­neath not super high up though, but I would want to reach min­ers to the next city over about 35–38km (kent wa to seat­tle wa). (fat clus­ter of min­ers) going to mount it up on his chimey with lmr400 cable prob 25–30ft. Box will be wifi but in the same room as the router prob­a­bly 15ft away. I got a 8–9 dbi anten­na( cant remem­ber) as part of a bun­dle with my pur­chase. Is that too pow­er­ful of an anten­na since im a bit up hill with ele­va­tion. or should i get some­thing like a 5.8 rak wireless.
    Also, is there a way im sup­pose to be fac­ing the anten­na, like which part of the anten­na is for­ward lol thank you! keep up the good work, you are the light of the heli­um com­mu­ni­ty XD haha

  26. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    5.8 will pro­l­ly be fine, but you should def test that (blog post here on how to test anten­nas).

    Dude, put in the effort to get that thing wired via eth­er­net, NOT WiFi. WiFi will cause you heartache.

    If the anten­na is direc­tion­al (usu­al­ly a square or blocky shape) it’ll mat­ter which way you face it. Oth­er­wise, it won’t.

  27. johnny Avatar
    johnny

    You are right gris­tle, ima whip my butt into shape. Im just gonna run 30ft of lmr400 instead of 28ft and run it down the chip­ney so i can get my min­er next to my modem to be con­nect­ed via eth­er­net!!! lol. If 5.8 is good enough, i guess il set my 8dbi aside and buy a 5.8! is rak a good one or do you have rec­om­men­da­tion between 5.8–7dbi to buy. thx

  28. Yeah! Avatar
    Yeah!

    Hey mate. I am read­ing again and again to take every­thing in! May I ask? You men­tion that “our anten­nas won´t blast through much more than 2 build­ings”. Is this true for the euro­pean min­ers too that work in dif­fer­ent fre­quen­cies? I am a bit new into this, so excuse me if this total­ly off. If it’s right though, it would explain why my 2 iso­lat­ed min­ers do not wit­ness each oth­er, while they are in a dis­tance of approx 300–400 meters. Thanks again! *(Large Laven­der Wasp, if you fan­cy tak­ing a look 🙂

  29. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Yep, though it’s less the fre­quen­cy dif­fer­ence and more the pow­er out­put; much low­er in EU868.
    Cheers,
    Nik

  30. Aaron Olson Avatar
    Aaron Olson

    I bought a 10 dbi anten­na with 33′ of cord. It does­n’t seem like the best qual­i­ty cord. Approx­i­mate­ly what is my dbi? 

  31. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Aaron, the prod­uct you linked to says ” 32.8FT RG58 SMA cable ‚include 1pcs RP-SMA adapter”.

    Best case you’re look­ing at a loss of 4.482 dB from the cable and a gain of 10 from the antenna.

    There are def bet­ter options. 🙂

  32. Hans Avatar
    Hans

    Hi Nik,

    with a lot of enthu­si­asm I read your posts. You impart an incred­i­ble amount of knowl­edge about heli­um and every­thing that goes with it. Many thanks for it!
    I live in Berlin and in the near future I will install a heli­um min­er on the roof of one of the high­est build­ings in the city (125m).
    I expect a bit of a cov­er­age shad­ow, because the anten­na has to be placed on one side of the build­ings roof and the length of the mast is lim­it­ed by the max­i­mum allowed total height.
    The plan is to use a ground plane anten­na with 5.15dbi.
    After read­ing your post I am a bit unsure if the anten­na gain might be too high.
    What is your opin­ion about this?

    With best regards from Berlin.

    Hans

  33. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Wie gehts Hans! You’ve reached the lim­its of my high school German. 😉

    I think the 5.15 dBi is fine. Test it and see, but I would­n’t wor­ry too much about antennas.

  34. Erick Cortes Avatar
    Erick Cortes

    Hel­lo friend first of all I want­ed to con­grat­u­late you for all the valu­able infor­ma­tion that is here! I want­ed to ask you which anten­na do you rec­om­mend? I live in an area where there are many hills and hous­es around it, I am like in a hole, the clos­est hotspots are after 10km and the fur­thest 40, all of them are at a high­er alti­tude … I can put an 8dbi anten­na at a great height ??

  35. Erdi Avatar
    Erdi

    Hel­lo, thanks for the info. I have 2 questions.
    1.Is it a huge prob­lem if I install a 3dbi anten­na slight­ly tilt­ed on a high building ?
    2. What is the best dbi anten­na for a bay area (sea­side with low ele­va­tion like 3 — 4 m near sea — across coasts are around 10 to 20 km away)?

  36. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Thanks Erick! Get­ting the anten­na up high is way more impor­tant than the type of anten­na. Any of the good ones will do; HNTen­na, Mcgill, L‑com, etc.

  37. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Erdi, I’d work pret­ty hard to make the the anten­na is cor­rect­ly ori­ent­ed and not tilt­ed, although at 3 dBi the gain pat­tern will prob­a­bly allow for a lit­tle error of vertical. 

    “Best dBi” is a red her­ring. Any decent qual­i­ty anten­na will work well, get­ting it high is the impor­tant part. 10–20km over water is easy for LoRa.

  38. Stacey Avatar
    Stacey

    Hel­lo, I just ordered 2 min­ers. I live in a very rur­al area I have two oth­er min­ers 13 miles away then the clos­est ones are 30 to 50 km away. Ter­rain is most­ly flat. I plan to mount the anten­na out­side about 30 ft high maybe a lit­tle high­er. What anten­na and oth­er equip­ment should I be look­ing at.

  39. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    That’s not very close; I’d set your expec­ta­tions low for earn­ings until you have more hotspots with­in, say, 5 km. A high­er gain anten­na might help, although get­ting the anten­na itself high­er is what will make far more difference.

  40. Duane Lusted Avatar
    Duane Lusted

    Hi Nik,
    Only just got into Min­ing a few days ago, and have a 3 month wait like oth­ers for my Linxdot.

    Live in the UK, and live in a nor­mal 2 sto­ry house. Got a few hotspots around where I live, but then oth­ers are like 10 miles away.
    Been read­ing that UK have max 16dBm, but want­i­ng to go with out­door Anten­na instead of the 3dBi indoor it comes with to increase chances of earn­ings. So, going by that and the new PoCV11, I assume I want to go a max 4.5dBi (look­ing at Paradar 868 one)?

    Or should I just get a max 3dBi out­door one?

  41. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Duane, get­ting the anten­na out­doors and up high will be way more impor­tant than type of anten­na. Either of those (3 or the 4.5) look fine. Enjoy get­ting it all set up!

  42. Tony Avatar
    Tony

    Hi Nik, Dig the con­tent. I am a com­plete new­bee. Have my first min­er in hand. I am going to try to get it all up and run­ning in Jan­u­ary. I live in South Jor­dan Ut. The topog­ra­phy is rather flat except for the oth­er hous­es going up in the area. I have a Direct TV anten­na on the house that is no longer used. I was think­ing of putting an exten­sion on it of 5 feet or so. And get­ting an anten­na that is 48″. Not sure what to buy? 5.6 dBI? Will run cable on out­side of house. Will need 30 ft or so. Will the LMR 400 work? Can I add addi­tion­al miners?
    Thanks and have a great Christmas.

  43. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hey Tony, wel­come to GK-land! 5.8 dBi is fine for your anten­na. Get­ting it up high and out­side will give you the best per­for­mance. Read this to help you under­stand the den­si­ty require­ments. Rock on.

  44. Jurgis Avatar
    Jurgis

    Hel­lo, i appre­ci­ate all this info here, I’m inter­est­ed in buy­ing this min­er and anten­na, would you think I’d be able to mine any­thing or con­nect with some­one else if I live in small city approx 500ppl, got 2 hotspots like 15km away in lit­tle more pop­u­lat­ed city 4000ppl it’s at the same sea lev­el as me but there’s forests start­ing after like 2km from my loca­tion. In Europe, Latvia main city is Riga ‚there are many min­ers There it’s about 60km away But the sea lev­el there Is about 200ft less than at my loca­tion but also there’s forests between, I live in 3rd sto­ry and I could get anten­na on roof which would be like +10metres. Just won­der­ing if there would be any anten­na that could get me a con­nec­tion that far or is it prof­itable with no con­nec­tions. I find it hard to find infor­ma­tion on this. Any help thanks!

  45. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Jur­gis, you prob­a­bly won’t con­nect with the sit­u­a­tion you described, but I’m bet­ting new Hotspots will pop up in your city soon.

  46. Con Avatar
    Con

    Hey Nik,
    Thank you for the great arti­cle. I’m on the 5th floor of a 8th floor con­do. Would I need to ground an anten­na mount­ed on my con­do bal­cony door win­dow? If so, would a light­ning arrestor suffice?

  47. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Tech­ni­cal­ly you should ground all out­door anten­nas. Light­ning arrestor is part of that chain for sure. In prac­tice you’ll find many anten­nas unground­ed, even by pros. Your mileage may vary.

  48. Elton Hammonds Avatar
    Elton Hammonds

    After read­ing your arti­cle, I’m con­fused by your state­ment about just for­get­ting yagi anten­nas. Why? 

    I’ve just ordered my Bob­cat 300 and out­door kit with sun shade from RAK.

    I’ll be mon­i­tor­ing the inter­nal com­po­nent temps close­ly and am plan­ning to pos­si­bly buy a big­ger box, crack open the min­er to install some heat syncs and cool­ing fan arrange­ment to keep it run­ning at opti­mal temps while adding a ther­mo­stat that will mon­i­tor the temp inside the box, trig­ger­ing a cool­ing fan for the box when it gets too hot inside.

    Either way, I plan to mount it about 4–5 feet oof the ground onto a pole that will like­ly be about 30 feet tall.

    For an aer­i­al, I was think­ing of con­nect­ing two antennas.

    The first would be a whip like this one:
    Sig­nalplus Lora 868/915MHz 900–930MHZ 15dBi Fiber­glass Anten­na 86inch for Heli­um Bob­cat HNT Hotspot Lora IoT Bob­cat Min­er Min­er Long­fi LoRaWAN Blockchain https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092RVG7JZ/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc_CTWF3Q215J9Y2RXSQ07R?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

    The sec­ond would be this yagi, which I would be prop­er­ly point­ed at an area about 15 miles away with many more min­ers than I have in my imme­di­ate area:
    https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/rf-solutions/ANT-MF-YAG23/5845729

    My plan, as I’ve imag­ined it so far, is to use a coax split­ter at the top, which I am guess­ing might cost me 3–5dbi and fig­ure I will have the best pos­si­ble chance of real­ly help­ing form a bridge for the heli­um net­work into my area by using that par­tic­u­lar yagi in con­junc­tion with that par­tic­u­lar whip 30 feet up, so as to not be blocked by trees and 2 sto­ry houses.

    But, you’re say­ing the Bob­cat will absolute­ly not allow this??? Based on what?

    I know the dbi actu­al total dbi will be slight­ly dimin­ished based on run­ning on 915mhz, by the split­ter and fur­ther­more by the 30 feet of coax to the bot­tom of the mast.

    But you say this won’t work with the Bob­cat 300 because the Heli­um net­work won’t allow for it?

    Where do you get that infor­ma­tion from? I haven’t read that any­where yet.

    I’m not say­ing you’re wrong, but I just haven’t read it any­where yet.

    I have a long back­ground in mil­i­tary com­mu­ni­ca­tions and had giv­en quite a bit of thought to it based on my geog­ra­phy here in cen­tral Flori­da, just north of New Port Richey, and my famil­iar­ly with wave­length propagation. 

    Thanks for post­ing this arti­cle and I hope to hear back from you here or by email at [email redact­ed] thanks ?

  49. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Elton, it’s def­i­nite­ly not that the Bob­cat or Heli­um won’t “allow” it. There is a long and thor­ough con­ver­sa­tion about the whole thing over here.

    You’re think­ing in terms of nor­mal radio com­mu­ni­ca­tions, where it’s Ok if a sig­nal is too strong, or you can still pull use­ful info out of a sig­nal that’s slight­ly too weak. With Heli­um, the sig­nal has to fall with­in a much nar­row­er range in order to “prove” it’s where/what it “says” it is. 

    IF you’re going to use a split­ter (which I gen­er­al­ly don’t rec­om­mend as it adds com­plex­i­ty and decreas­es sig­nal strength to both anten­nas), both anten­nas will need to have the same gain. That’s because you can only report one gain to the app, so if your whip is 15 dBi the yagi will also have to be 15 dBi. In the spe­cif­ic mod­el you linked, it’s not, it’s 23 dBi. So you’d have to use an atten­u­a­tor to bring it down, which will com­pli­cate things and negate the whole pur­pose of using a yagi.

    You could, if you like play­ing with radios and math, futz around with an ampli­fi­er for the whip, although that’s also not recommended. 

    Because 915 and specif­i­cal­ly LoRa is such a robust car­ri­er of small pack­ets of data, you don’t need to do any­thing fan­cy. With clear line of sight (which you’d need any­way for the yagi) you can eas­i­ly go 30km, and I’ve seen up to 200km over water.

    I mean, I get it. When I first found Heli­um I thought I could apply a pre­vi­ous career’s under­stand­ing of RF to make “the ulti­mate anten­na set­up.” I under­stand the intent to apply past expe­ri­ence to this in order to increase value/coverage etc. I’m not say­ing it won’t work, it’s just gen­er­al­ly not worth the effort. Heli­um is built to keep things ultra simple. 

    Just get a low gain anten­na up high, report loss accu­rate­ly to reflect EIRP, and you’ll be doing the best you can do for a giv­en loca­tion. Remem­ber, *loca­tion* is crit­i­cal to earn­ings. Anten­nas & cables & con­nec­tors and loss are what give you the last 10% or so of your earnings.

  50. Nash Willis Avatar
    Nash Willis

    Hi Nick, I live in Clin­ton wa. 98236. I would think I could order num­ber 4 on your list and roof mount it and point it at Everett. But I do have one close to me and that and one more with­in 5 miles of me. Thank you, Nash

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