Category: Helium

  • Reports From The Field: Tracking With Helium

    I recent­ly drove up to par­tic­i­pate in the USA Hike & Fly­’s Ojai race on Octo­ber 31st, both as an ath­lete and a provider of track­ing with Heli­um. The ath­lete side was fun, but expen­sive. I land­ed in the bush­es and tore up my wing enough to war­rant buy­ing a new one. Not cheap. Still,…

  • How To Troubleshoot Your Helium Hotspot

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    Heli­um is a rapid­ly grow­ing and wild ecosys­tem. Like any oth­er new ecosys­tem, things are con­stant­ly chang­ing, and the main sources of infor­ma­tion most new users rely on (Explor­er and the Heli­um app) can be up 48 hours behind.  That means when you check your Hotspot via Explor­er on Tues­day, you could be look­ing at…

  • The Helium CLI Wallet — Not For The Faint Of Heart

    There’s almost no good rea­son to use the CLI (Com­mand Line Inter­face) wal­let for a nor­mal per­son, but…not every­one who gets into Heli­um is nor­mal. If, like me, you’re faced with hav­ing to use it, this series of instruc­tions might help.  This is NOT writ­ten for experts who know what they’re doing; they’ll laugh at this.…

  • What Does PoCv11 Mean For Me?

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    Short ver­sion: Use a low gain anten­na, report your loca­tion and anten­na gain accu­rate­ly. If you’re in the US, this isn’t a big deal, as our radios pump out enough pow­er to get excel­lent range even with a low gain anten­na. If you’re in a region (UK, EU, etc) where your radio out­put is low,…

  • What Does A Good Hotspot Cluster Look Like?

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    40–60 Hotspots, all about 1,500m away from any oth­er, with any one of ’em hav­ing clear line of sight to at least 30 others.  Wait, you want more, and you want to know how I came up with that (with help)? Start by read­ing my post on PoC cycles, oth­er­wise you’ll be miss­ing some key…

  • Helium Deployed: The Network In Action

    Our pilot project is com­plete, and boy have we learned a ton from this one! While many are still focus­ing on earn­ing HNT for Heli­um Hotspot deploy­ments, the obvi­ous move for those of us inter­est­ed in longevi­ty is actu­al­ly USING the Network. Over the course of a week, sup­port­ed by Tom­my and Ryan at Lon­es­tar…

  • Is Helium A Better “Last Chance”?

    I got into Heli­um acci­den­tal­ly. I was look­ing for a way to find and com­mu­ni­cate with oth­er paraglid­ers out back of beyond. I had par­tic­i­pat­ed in a Search and Res­cue for a well known paraglid­er out in remote Neva­da at the end of sum­mer 2020.  The miss­ing paraglid­er pilot (James John­ston, aka Kiwi) had GPS and…

  • How To Use Hotspotty To Crush

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    Hotspot­ty start­ed as a way for Daniel Andrade (@spillere on Dis­cord) to man­age the grow­ing fleet of Heli­um Hotspots he was rolling out togeth­er with Maxime Goossens and Alex­is Argent. In the begin­ning we had a tiny script that would send our dai­ly rewards to a Telegram group.  It’s, uh, grown from that. 🙂 Let’s start with…

  • Victory With Helium: Power Moves For New People

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    Ok, so you just found Heli­um and are won­der­ing what to do next? Let’s walk through the whole sys­tem so you’ll know what to do and what NOT to do. We’ll go through the ecosytem of Heli­um, the incen­tive of HNT, explain Heli­um Wal­lets as well as the Burn and Mint equi­lib­ri­um, and make sure…

  • What Does A Great Helium Hotspot Look Like?

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    See­ing oth­er deploy­ments is one of the fastest ways to get great ideas (and avoid cost­ly mistakes!)  I thought it’d be use­ful to the com­mu­ni­ty to share a lit­tle more detail about our Heli­um Hotspot deploy­ments. Here’s your chance to shine! What hotspot are you using? What anten­na? Are you hap­py with this deploy­ment? What will…