How To Estimate Your HNT Earnings With HotspotRF

The con­stant ques­tion with Heli­um is, “How much will my hotspot earn?” While I’ve cov­ered the strat­e­gy for max­i­miz­ing that in oth­er posts, it sure is nice when you have a tool that helps dial in your accu­ra­cy. HotspotRF aims to be one of those tools, and when it first came out I sat down with the own­er, Aidan Cur­ry, to walk through how to use it. That inter­view is at the bot­tom of this post, but I thought I’d check in on the tool and see what’s new. As it turns out, a TON!

Like Helium.Vision (walk­through here), HotspotR­F’s main offer­ing is RF (for Radio Fre­quen­cy) simulation. 

Let’s say you just moved to Vegas, up in the nice part of town just north west of Sum­mer­lin. You want to know if putting a 21′ pole on top of your two sto­ry house will help pay the mort­gage, right?

One of the best ways to see if your loca­tion *might* work is to run an RF sim­u­la­tion to see how far those lit­tle LoRa pack­ets will fly. You plug in some details, like your spe­cif­ic fre­quen­cy (915 for us North Amer­i­can types), anten­na gain, cable loss, height of anten­na, and type of ter­rain, and HotspotRF will spit out an image of what your radio cov­er­age should look like.

Now, you’ve got to sign up first, so even though you get free cred­its, you’ll need to pay for a plan in order to get full val­ue. For a test run, I picked a place just south of the US bor­der. The greater Tijua­na area has been rock­ing late­ly, and I’ve been eye­ing some of those moun­tain place­ments. So, I picked a promis­ing look­ing spot, dropped a pin, and hit the “Sim­u­late Loca­tion” button.

Sims take a while to run on any plat­form, whether it’s Heli­umVi­sion, Hotspot­ty, or HotspotRF. You’re ask­ing for an extra­or­di­nary amount of infor­ma­tion to be crunched.

If this is your first time using it and you haven’t signed up yet, you’ll get the “Active Sub­scrip­tion Required” prompt. 

I chose a Hob­by­ist plan. I don’t have a huge need for ETL stats (I get those from anoth­er project I’m part of), but if you’re get­ting deep into the weeds those start to become useful. 

After run­ning the sim, HotspotRF pre­dicts that this will earn 21% above local aver­age, woohoo!

As with all sim­u­la­tions, it’s not a guar­an­tee. For off grid hotspots (which is what I enjoy the most), these esti­ma­tions will be fur­ther off; in the view of the pre­dic­tion algo­rithm, off grids are outliers.

HotspotRF makes it pret­ty easy to get a good idea of the cov­er­age you have. In this case, the spot I (with­out much map study) picked looks like it has a sig­nif­i­cant block direct­ly to the west all the way up to the NNW sec­tor. It’s pos­si­ble I dropped the pin in a small local val­ley or dip, but I had­n’t seen the Ter­rain lay­er in Set­tings, so was­n’t able to zoom in and get a feel for terrain.

I thought I’d do a quick check on the earn­ing esti­mates and drop anoth­er place­ment near a known high per­form­ing Hotspot. I’d expect this place­ment to more or less match Ama­teur Jade Hare, one of the high­est local earn­ers here in San Diego (and prob­a­bly the install I’ve had the most fun with). 

To be VERY clear here, the loca­tion I’m sim­u­lat­ing is on pub­lic land and is NOT one you should con­sid­er actu­al­ly deploy­ing a Hotspot to. 

This time I turned the Ter­rain lay­er on. You’ll notice it’s “sharp­er” than the real ter­rain (they do this on pur­pose). I fly my paraglid­er in this area all the time, so the dif­fer­ence was notice­able to me. Here’s a quick clip from a flight in Feb 2022 to show what it actu­al­ly looks like. As I turn right here, about 4 sec­onds in, you can see the length of the El Cajon moun­tain. That beep­ing, by the way, is an instru­ment called a “vario”, and beep­ing means we’re going up (in a ther­mal). This was a love­ly day to fly.

In con­trast, here’s the Ter­rain on HotspotRF, from a per­spec­tive fur­ther to the south and prob­a­bly a few thou­sand feet higher.

We inten­tion­al­ly exag­ger­ate the ter­rain by 150% to make it eas­i­er for users to see the con­tours of the land and bet­ter place hotspots. A lot of users were say­ing it’s hard to see the ter­rain before we updat­ed this.

-HotspotRF team

That’s pret­ty cool in my book; they saw that users were hav­ing a prob­lem and came up with a fric­tion-reduc­ing fix unno­tice­able to most that solved the prob­lem. That’s the sign of a team ded­i­cat­ed to user expe­ri­ence — very cool!

Ok, so how did the pre­dic­tion line up with real life? Well, let’s start with a caveat: This is an off grid, and off grids are much hard­er to pre­dict for a vari­ety of rea­sons. In this case, the pre­dic­tion came in at low­er than the actu­al earn­ings, 19 HNT vs the approx 25 HNT the near­by Hotspot has actu­al­ly earned over the past 30 days. That’s a good thing; you prob­a­bly don’t want to over-pre­dict what you’ll make. Here’s the esti­mate and pre­dict­ed coverage:

The HRF team dove in to why this hap­pens for off grids, which I thought was pret­ty cool. It demon­strates to me they have a deep under­stand­ing of the field of play, who their main cus­tomers are, and how the whole sys­tem gen­er­al­ly works. That is exact­ly what you want in a tool like this. I’ll let ’em take it from here:

For crazy off-grid setups like the ones you do, our tool is always going to under­es­ti­mate the earn­ings. Off-grid setups are fair­ly uncom­mon and more of an edge case com­pared to the aver­age deploy­ment. Why? 

Our algo­rithm fil­ters out and dis­counts rewards from hotspots with very few wit­ness­es com­pared to how many hotspots are in the area. 

For exam­ple, if you run a sim­u­la­tion and should be able to reach 200 hotspots, but some of those hotspots only have a cou­ple wit­ness­es, we assume those hotspots are “un-reach­able” due to poor placement/setup so we ignore them in the calculation. 

This is the only way to give the major­i­ty accu­rate esti­mates, but for off-grid setups, the real­i­ty is you can prob­a­bly wit­ness those hotspots, which is why for those “edge case” deploy­ments our tool tends to underestimate.

-HotspotRF team

For “nor­mal” setups, the esti­mates are much clos­er. Keep in mind that for ALL deploy­ments, the amount of HNT you earn per Hotspot will only decrease as the amount of Hotspots on the net­work grows.

On the rest of the tool, the col­or cod­ing of hotspots is super sim­ple to under­stand, and there are a bunch of lay­ers you can use to see Heli­um cov­er­age and oppor­tu­ni­ties in dif­fer­ent ways. You can hov­er over a hotspot to see its earn­ings, which saves you from open­ing up a win­dow over in Explor­er to do the same thing.

HotspotRF also allows you to click on a Hotspot and get quick stats on it; this is a fast way to see if a port is open, how much it’s earn­ing, who its wit­ness­ing, etc.

In gen­er­al, HotspotRF appears pret­ty darn use­ful for folks pressed for time and who aren’t look­ing to man­age a fleet, just make assessments. 

Here’s the walk­through with Aidan from back in April of 2021. We had some tech dif­fi­cul­ties right in the mid­dle of it, so you’ll see a jump from a day to a night call. Enjoy this new tool!

Want to try HotspotRF out for your­self? Use code gristleking for a lit­tle dis­count, and take HotspotRF for a spin!

If you’d like to join up with a crew of like-mind­ed folks pas­sion­ate about Heli­um and dis­cuss HotspotRF (or any­thing else Heli­um-relat­ed), take a look at the Gris­tle Crüe, my com­mu­ni­ty of rad folks in pur­suit of Heli­um excellence!