Author: Nik

  • Is Your Helium Radio Signal Good Enough?

    How do you make sure a radio sig­nal is with­in accept­able lim­its for Heli­um? Short ver­sion: Assert your anten­na gain (includ­ing your cable loss) and loca­tion accu­rate­ly and you don’t need to do any­thing else. Wait, you want more? Dawg, why did­n’t you say so? Let’s dive in! First, let’s start with why we need an “accept­able”…

  • How Do You Cheat On The Helium Network?

    This is a gen­er­al expla­na­tion of how gamers are steal­ing HNT on the net­work. This is not a “how to”. Most of us putting up Heli­um Hotspots have no idea how the sys­tem works. It can feel frus­trat­ing to be cheat­ed and not under­stand it. Let’s go through a few of the more com­mon meth­ods.…

  • How To Turn Your Daily Drive Into Profit With Hivemapper

    Map­ping is big busi­ness.  From 2016–2018, Uber paid Google $58 mil­lion for the use of Google’s maps.  That’s $53,00 per DAY.  Map­ping, of course is a data flow tech­nol­o­gy, and where data flows, mon­ey goes.  You and I, as “nor­mal peo­ple” are just begin­ning to be able to tap into these per­va­sive data flows around…

  • Does Your Helium Hotspot Need A Security Camera?

    “Do you wor­ry about your off grid hotspot get­ting stolen?”  I get that ques­tion a lot.  My short answer is “No”.  In gen­er­al, I fol­low what I con­sid­er a few secu­ri­ty best practices: Make it hard to find. Make it hard to get to. Don’t leave your valu­ables unprotected. In the world of Heli­um off grids, how­ev­er,…

  • RevoFi and Far Edge: What Happens When YOU Own the System?

    I sat down with Justin Caswell, CEO of RevoFi, to walk through what RevoFi is, what it aims to do, and how it’s dif­fer­ent than any­thing else out there.  Includ­ing, yes, Helium. In brief, RevoFi sells a phys­i­cal device that offers 4 ways to earn blockchain tokens called Revos: WiFi 6 Mesh Coverage Edge Com­pute Decen­tral­ized…

  • Understanding Helium 5G: The Challenge and Expert Advice

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    Over the course of the past year, we’ve all learned how to max­i­mize the deploy­ment of a LoRa Heli­um min­er. It’s been a fun run as we sort­ed through the vital parts of a high earn­ing deployment: Loca­tion (Local Density) cLoS (Clear Line of Sight) Anten­na Elevation Anten­na Type Cables & Install Details Now we’re faced with…

  • The Ultimate Workflow For Fixing Your Relayed Helium Miner

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    Ready to fix relayed sta­tus on your Heli­um Min­er? @Jason (Jason#8116) over on Dis­cord built a giant and tru­ly glo­ri­ous work­flow for get­ting through it, but I’ll be hon­est: It’s intim­i­dat­ing to the first timer. I went ahead and took Jason’s work­flow and with his per­mis­sion, hired a Venezue­lan pro­gram­mer to make it easy for you…

  • Testing Your Helium Antenna & Placement With A GLAMOS

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    Do you have the best anten­na for your loca­tion? What kind of cov­er­age is your Heli­um Hotspot pro­vid­ing? Is the loca­tion you’ve iden­ti­fied as good on Helium.Vision actu­al­ly that good? The way to answer these ques­tions defin­i­tive­ly is to test your set­up. No amount of sim­u­la­tion, pre­dic­tion, or just think­ing (or even hop­ing) will replace the…

  • Foundations of Relayed Hotspots (and how to fix ’em!)

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    I got a chance to sit down with the mighty @BFGNeil recent­ly and boy did I learn a ton! Neil is one of my fel­low Heli­um Dis­cord mod­er­a­tors and one of the most help­ful and knowl­edge­able mem­bers of the community.  Neil’s built what I think is the sin­gle most use­ful tool for most Heli­um Hotspot…

  • Lessons Learned From A Year Of Helium Deployments

    It’s been a lit­tle over a year since I start­ed deploy­ing Heli­um Hotspots. In that year, after deploy­ing Hotspots both on grid and off grid on homes, com­mer­cial build­ings, and (my favorite) in the moun­tains, I’ve learned a ton about what to do, what not to do, and how to make the most of the…