Gristle King - A Guide to DePIN

How Much HNT Will My Hotspot Earn?

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by

Nik
in

One of the most fre­quent­ly asked ques­tions in all of the Heli­um space is: “How much will I earn?” 

Here’s how to get to a rea­son­ably accu­rate pre­dic­tion for your loca­tion. We’ll start with num­bers, do some more num­bers, do a lit­tle edu­cat­ed guess­ing, and end up with a con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate of how much a giv­en spot will earn.

The Global Average

Start­ing at the top, the glob­al dai­ly aver­age for a Heli­um Hotspot that’s online is .091 HNT/day. How did I get that? Math.

I took the share of HNT we Hotspots get month­ly (26%), added in the unused HNT from Net­work Data Trans­fer, removed the Hotspots that are offline, and came up with a rea­son­able glob­al aver­age. Just in case you missed it above:

The Global Average For A Helium Hotspot is .091 HNT/day As Of March 6th, 2022.

So, is that YOU will get? On aver­age, prob­a­bly. Of course, if you’re read­ing this blog, you’re prob­a­bly above aver­age. In that case, how do we make a rea­son­able guess for how much YOU will make, in YOUR loca­tion. Lemme show ya:

Here’s how I’d do it: Take the Glob­al Aver­age as my start point, see if my Region­al Aver­age is high­er or low­er, take a look at local res 8 hex­es, decide whether or not my deploy­ment will be above or below aver­age, and make an edu­cat­ed guess off of that.

If you want help with that, try either of the Heli­um Cours­es on this site, or you can join the Gris­tle Crüe and jump in on week­ly calls where you and a bunch of oth­er folks into Heli­um can learn from me and each oth­er on how to crush it in Helium.

Here are all my sources for this info:

  • Num­ber of Hotspots, DC burned, HNT Price: Heli­um Explorer
  • Per­cent­age of Hotspots Online: DeWi ETL
  • Num­ber of HNT Dis­trib­uted Per Month, PoC & Net­work Data Trans­fer Per­cent­ages: Heli­um Docs

Here are the resources used in the video:

I’ll fin­ish up with what Heli­um USED to be like. This was post was ini­tial­ly writ­ten in mid-March of 2021. I’m leav­ing it up most­ly for his­tor­i­cal pur­pos­es (and so some of the old­er com­ments make sense.) Rock on!

LEGACY STUFF — READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO SEE WHAT HELIUM WAS LIKE IN MAY OF 2021

Oh, the oth­er ques­tion you’ll have is along the line of: If I only have XX hotspots in my city, and I own them all, how much can I expect to earn? There are many caveats to this, most­ly cen­ter­ing around how many of those hotspots can “see” each oth­er. One SUPER impor­tant thing to note from these exam­ples is that most hotspots own­ers do a poor job of deploy­ment, earn­ing on aver­age 2 HNT/day. An opti­mized hotspot with good place­ment should earn at least 8 HNT/day. If you’d like help with doing a much bet­ter job, con­sid­er hir­ing me to help you max­i­mize your earn­ings.

I’ll give you a few real world exam­ples of 7 day earn­ings. (data here, as of May 9th, 2021).

  • Flagstaff, AZ — 6 hotspots — 79.52 HNT
  • Jerome, AZ — 6 hotspots — 97.91 HNT 
  • Mid­land, TX — 4 hotspots — 57.3 HNT
  • Col­lege Sta­tion, TX — 4 hotspots — 68.25 HNT
  • Char­lottesville, VA — 4 hotspots — 46.15 HNT
  • Erie, PA — 4 hotspots — 25.89 HNT
  • Elfri­da, AZ — 3 hotspots — 57.98 HNT
  • Ari­zona, TX — 2 hotspots — 24.67 HNT
  • Colum­bus, GA — 2 hotspots, 42.50 HNT
  • Three Rivers, MI — 2 hotspots — 14.26 HNT

For those of you who want to see how I come up with aver­ages and be able to do it them­selves, here’s a 10 minute video that uses Site­bot. Site­bot used to be a superb resource, but has degrad­ed and is no longer good for this. Still, I’ll leave this up so you can see the thought process. 

This will show you how much HNT you should expect to earn on aver­age, and you’ll learn how to eas­i­ly refine that num­ber for your­self, in your city.

Before we move on, let me set some expec­ta­tions. This post was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in mid-March of 2021. We only had 22k hotspots on the net­work at the time. 3 weeks lat­er (April 5th) we had 25k. That num­ber will con­tin­ue to go up, prob­a­bly to 200k by the end of the sum­mer of 2021. With­in a few weeks of it being writ­ten, all the hard num­bers in this post will be wrong. Still, you can use the method in the video to cal­cu­late what the num­bers *should* be for the next few weeks for you. 

First, I’ll knock out my assumptions:

I’ll assume that you are NOT going to plug in your hotspot at Mom’s house and walk away. If you do that, you should expect to earn less than .1 HNT a day.

I’ll assume that you’re will­ing to spend mon­ey, time, and effort to opti­mize your hotspot place­ment. As in, more time than your friends and fam­i­ly think is “rea­son­able”.

As I learned long ago from Shawn Alla­dio (one of only two humans to ever ride a jet­s­ki over a 100′ wave) if you want to do awe­some things you should be unrea­son­able. Be like Shawn. She’s rad.

I’ll assume that you under­stand the gen­er­al intent of Heli­um. Psst, it’s to pro­vide as much use­ful cov­er­age as pos­si­ble for IoT devices run­ning on the Heli­um network.

Final­ly, I’ll assume you’re not con­tem­plat­ing a “lone wolf” place­ment, which is one where there is no pos­si­ble way for anoth­er hotspot to con­nect with you via radio signal.

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s start high. Like, way high. The top earn­ing hotspot in the world (as of March 14th, 2021) is Rough Chili Bird, in Spring­dale, Arkansas. Before I tell you how much HNT they’re earn­ing, let’s define “top earning.”

Basi­cal­ly, no Heli­um data for earn­ings is use­ful at any­thing less than a 7 day cycle. 24 hour, even 48 hour stats are just too vari­able to be use­ful. As an exam­ple, here are the dai­ly earn­ings for a rea­son­ably high per­form­ing hotspot.

As you can see, they vary wild­ly day by day, and if you con­stant­ly fid­dle with it in order to improve, you’ll be respond­ing to noise, not signal.

Heli­um is all about signal.

Back to the world’s high­est earn­ing hotspot, Rough Chili Bird.

The Bird earned 2,850 HNT over the last 30 days. Yeah, that’s a lot. At cur­rent HNT prices well, peo­ple work a lot hard­er for a lot less mon­ey per month.

Sec­ond place is Docile Bone Pony over in Cam­bridge MA, earn­ing 1,787 HNT in the last 30 days. No, I don’t make these names up, and nei­ther do the hotspot own­ers. They’re ran­dom­ly assigned.

Here’s the top 10 earn­ers, pulled off of Site­bot.

So that’s the MOST you’re like­ly to make. You prob­a­bly won’t make that much. I went through a few cities (includ­ing my own, America’s Finest City) to give you some averages.

For your aver­age hotspot, you’re look­ing at right around 8 HNT/day.

I got that by going through and weed­ing out all the hotspots mak­ing less than 1 HNT/day. If they’re doing that, it’s pret­ty obvi­ous they’re not in this to crush, and that’s my goal. CRUSH.

I was curi­ous about the crush­ers, so I went through the top 1,000 Hotspots in the USA and found the aver­age was more than twice as high; about 23 HNT/day. You can rea­son­ably expect that if you opti­mize den­si­ty, ele­va­tion, and anten­na, in that order.

I went through a few exam­ple cities (San Diego, Seat­tle, Lon­don, and Berlin) and then I looked for the answer to the sec­ond most pop­u­lar ques­tion I get asked, which is:

“I live in a small city and could buy 5–10 hotspots right now. Should I do it? How much will I make?”

The stats are in the video, here’s the bor­ing stuff for those of us who read.

San Diego has 142 hotspots earn­ing more than 1 HNT/day. The aver­age hotspot earns 9 HNT/day, and the top earn­er pulled in 1,334 in the last 30 days.

Seat­tle has 90 hotspots earn­ing more than 1 HNT/day. The aver­age hotspot earns 8 HNT/day, and the top earn­er pulled in 706 in the last 30 days.

Seattle Helium Hotspot Earnings

Lon­don has 188 hotspots earn­ing more than 1 HNT/day. The aver­age hotspot earns 8 HNT/day, and the top earn­er pulled in 1,266 in the last 30 days.

Berlin has 134 hotspots earn­ing more than 1 HNT/day. The aver­age hotspot earns 12 HNT/day, and the top earn­er pulled in 1,617 in the last 30 days.

Berlin Helium Hotspot top earner

Final­ly, I found a small clus­ter of hotspots that is typ­i­cal of any small deploy­ment in a city. It was on the south side of Cypress, in Limas­sol. While there are 10 hotspots deployed there, only 5 have been run­ning for 30 days or more. Those 5 aver­age 16 HNT/day, but the top earn­er only pulled in 592 in the last 30 days.

Helium Hotspots in Limassol, Cypress

This should help you get a rough idea of how much you’ll make. For more on Heli­um Hotspot Opti­miza­tion you can read my guide over here.

If you’d like a dif­fer­ent take on earn­ings with an ori­en­ta­tion toward what might hap­pen in the future as the net­work grows, check out Steve’s arti­cle over on DeWi.

Best of luck with your deploy­ments, let’s grow this net­work togeth­er and CRUSH! If you’d like help with a Heli­um deploy­ment, from a sin­gle hotspot to an entire ecosys­tem, con­sid­er hir­ing me.

None of this is invest­ment advice. Keep read­ing and learn­ing. You could lose every­thing. I hope you don’t. I hope you win so big that you track me down and plant a big wet kiss on my cheek and slip a QR code with 10 BTC into my pock­et because you just have that much to spare. Here’s to your success!

Comments

101 responses to “How Much HNT Will My Hotspot Earn?”

  1. Mark Cobleigh Avatar
    Mark Cobleigh

    In your arti­cle about max­i­miz­ing your hotspot you men­tioned that we should­n’t use more than 5 feet of cable. If that is impos­si­ble, what is the max length we should run if we’re using LMR400 cabling? I have a few spots that will be very high and very dif­fi­cult to get to after ini­tial install (rent­ing a boom lift) and want to run about 50 feet of cable down to about 15 feet above ground where the hotspot will be. I hate to go through all this just to find out that 50 feet of cabling is too much. Also, I can’t seem to find much infor­ma­tion on “ter­mi­nat­ing” LMR400 wire. With reg­u­lar coax I have my own tools and can run my own cabling from a spool of it. Can I do the same with LMR400? Thanks in advance, and great arti­cles to read, best yet.

  2. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hey Mark,
    I need to re-word that “5′ rule”. It’s a good idea to keep cable as short as pos­si­ble, but it’s not a game-ender if you have to make a long run. That’s what low loss cable is for. One of the high­est earn­ing hotspots out there uses 60′ of LMR400, although that is def­i­nite­ly the excep­tion, not the rule. :). 

    100′ is prob­a­bly the max length, but you’re going to lose a fair amount over that length, so you’ll need to off­set that with anten­na selec­tion (beyond the scope of this arti­cle & com­ment) and elevation.

    To ter­mi­nate LMR400 you’ll prob­a­bly spend about $300 in new tools, then there’s the cost of the cable & the con­nec­tors. You’re prob­a­bly bet­ter off just get­ting USACoax to build you cus­tom lengths. 

    Here are the rec­om­mend­ed tools from that linked video on how to terminate:

    CCT-02 cut­ting tool — $45
    CST-400 prep tool — $100
    CT-300/400 crimp tool — $150
    Biodegrad­able sil­i­con lubricant

  3. Robert Avatar
    Robert

    I use 12′ of LMR-400 on a 5dBi Near­son anten­na and earn rough­ly 20HNT per day with rough­ly 8–10 recent wit­ness­es. My Anten­na is around 24′ off the ground and on a hill with a good line of sight. I used USA Coax to get 10′ and 2′ LMR-400 cables con­nect­ed by a light­ning arrestor. There isn’t real­ly a hotspot that should be wit­ness­ing mine that isn’t. To me, height and line of sight are the main fac­tor. Hav­ing said that, I could have set­tled on only 5′ of cable, but was con­cerned about mak­ing the mast top-heavy with the enclo­sure and hotspot mount­ed near the top. Won­der­ing if you’ve had any trou­ble with wind on that super high mast in San Diego? I’m plan­ning on set­ting up 3 out­door anten­nas in a rur­al area so that they can wit­ness each oth­er and pro­vide cov­er­age to a small city of around 50,000 peo­ple. I’d like to short­en the coax, but am con­cerned about the top heav­i­ness. Any tips?

  4. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Robert, agree 100% re height & line of sight; those (and cor­rect den­si­ty) are what deter­mine the major­i­ty of earn­ings. Con­nec­tions are a dis­tant fourth. 

    I guyed that pole on the moun­tain­top; the weath­er sta­tion that’s also on there has record­ed 58 mph gusts, and all appears to be good.

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  6. Martin Avatar
    Martin

    The three words for loca­tion names should be tied into the Awe­some glob­al map­ping sys­tem “what3words” which is also catch­ing on real­ly quick. The three words iden­ti­fy a unique grid loca­tion on the world where peo­ple are now using it for deliv­er­ies (piz­za, drone etc) and is far more pre­cise than a tra­di­tion­al zip code.
    For instance, my loca­tion in the world is “straddled.spinning.myself”. Com­bin­ing Heli­um address­es with what3words is very log­i­cal to me.

  7. Robert Engelbrecht Avatar
    Robert Engelbrecht

    I under­stand the 300m hotspot sep­a­ra­tion but . . I intend installing on the roof of my 5flr con­do build­ing and we’re on an escarp­ment in my city . So I’m won­der­ing if I could place two hotspots ( one each on the east & west ends of the roof which is about 100m long) using two flat pan­el anten­nas backed with met­al sheet­ing and direct­ed 180deg oppo­site each oth­er. I’m hop­ing this will allow me to reach the max num­ber of hotspots in my city (Cal­gary, AB, Cana­da) and opti­mize my earn­ings. Comments ?

  8. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Robert, you’ll clip your own earn­ings by hav­ing 2 in the same hex 8, plus you may run into black box rules designed to com­bat gam­ing. Bet­ter with an omni up on a pole on the roof.

  9. Tucker Avatar
    Tucker

    Hey Nik
    Just ordered an indoor one for my apart­ment. Looked on the map and saw I am in a red zone with one about a half mile away. I live in Los Ange­les. How will this effect my poten­tial earnings?

  10. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Tuck­er,
    Being in the red zone will clip your and their earn­ings, and you won’t be able to witness/earn from each oth­er. If you can find anoth­er spot out­side of the red zone (assum­ing you’re talk­ing about Helium.Place) you’ll dou­ble your earn­ing potential.

  11. Knut E. Avatar
    Knut E.

    Hey! I’m con­sid­er­ing get­ting some hotspots, I real­ly love the con­cept and all of that… But I real­ized that two things might lim­it my earnings. 

    1. I live far from the clos­est active hotspots (we’re talk­ing 325km away, they’re in the cap­i­tal, and I’m not)
    2. There are moun­tains cut­ting my line of sight from the clos­est “medi­um” city (no hotspots there either, but I could set up one there as well, the dis­tance from my home hotspot and the one in the city would be ~13km)

    Would you say this would still be worth it, or should I just drop it and move on?

  12. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Knut,
    Prob­a­bly not worth it to set up a bunch of lone wolf hotspots. If you can man­age a deploy­ment where 3 or 4 hotspots can com­mu­ni­cate and pro­vide use­ful cov­er­age, that’ll be a much bet­ter option.

  13. jorge Avatar
    jorge

    Hey Nik, thanks for the write-up. Very good stuff. I’m still doing my research but lean­ing on the Nebra Out­door and just pre-order now. Based on your oth­er write-up, this would be a good way to go.

    Checked the cov­er­age map around me and there seem to be a good amount of hotspots near­by. I’m in City of Mia­mi prop­er, in a house, clos­er to the more dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed areas, and the down­town and finan­cial dis­tricts where there are high-rises.

    Still read­ing up, but I see one hotspot that’s about 4 blocks from me, has a good amount of wit­ness­es, and respectable earn­ings poten­tial. But I see oth­ers that are not so great. I’m going to walk by there tonight to see if I can scope the aer­i­al. I also checked helium.place and there’s about 15 hotspots in the sweet spot out­side the 350m radius. Seems like it could be pret­ty lucra­tive based on the earn­ings of this one hotspot 4 blocks away, but the earn­ings of the oth­ers pale by com­par­i­son. What’s dri­ving the difference? 

    I’d like to start with one, but we have an invest­ment prop­er­ty about 2.5 miles away from our pri­ma­ry res­i­dence that I could expand to. I have a sec­ond invest­ment prop­er­ty, but that’s about 12 miles away and there does­n’t seem to be a lot of hotspots out there.

  14. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Jorge, the uneven earn­ings are prob­a­bly due to what I call a “Canyons & Crags” strat­e­gy, where one hotspot can see many oth­ers that can’t all see each oth­er. The one that can see many gets earn­ings “focused” on it.

  15. jorge Avatar
    jorge

    Inter­est­ing. Thanks for the insight. I walked around last night and could not see an aer­i­al any­where on that house, so I start­ed won­der­ing if the loca­tion asser­tion was cor­rect or maybe your C&C strat­e­gy explains it. This hotspot is approx 397m from my loca­tion. And has wit­ness­es as far as 2km out. I’m very curi­ous about it and I won­der if I could ben­e­fit by hav­ing this hotspot right out­side the invalid wit­ness zone.

    https://explorer.helium.com/hotspots/11HDX56zJiVUxXWMrrXbtAbaNoSEP16TgN4jTdbY3wHBpCo9PtJ

    I also walked by anoth­er four that are all clus­tered, around 800m from my loca­tion. They look to be on the roofs of a com­mer­cial structure. 

    All con­sid­ered, seems like a good sce­nario to move for­ward with a Nebra out­door and see where it goes. Thanks for let­ting me bounce ideas and would appre­ci­ate your com­ments on the above.

  16. Will Avatar
    Will

    Hey NIK, I live in a rur­al town of 1500 that has none of these. The next town over has 3hotspots . which is about 15miles away. if buy 3 or 4 of these and place them through­out town will it even be worth the time and money?

  17. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Prob­a­bly. Look for sets of 3 that are iso­lat­ed and check out earn­ings. Last time I did that it was 60 HNT/miner/month with a 3 set. Not amaz­ing, but not bad either.

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  19. Lisa Helser Avatar
    Lisa Helser

    I live in a coun­ty that has only 1 green dot, 15 miles from me. Is this worth me get­ting into?
    Thank you

  20. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Prob­a­bly not if you’re only going to get one and it can’t con­nect with the oth­er one. Best to have groups of at least 4, see The Dice 5 strat­e­gy, here.

  21. James Cowin Avatar
    James Cowin

    Hey Nik,

    Cou­ple of ques­tions. First let me say thanks for your help and this page, lots of good info and a LOT to read so please for­give me if I am ask­ing ques­tions that you have cov­ered elsewhere. 

    I live in a third world coun­try, who would use my hotspots? Do I have to adver­tise? Where does the “mon­ey” come from?

    There is a city in this coun­try (where I have friends) and it has three hotspots. Would plac­ing 3 of my own hotspots in that city (new total of 6 hotspots not in any Red­Zones) be bet­ter or worse than installing 3 hotspots (no oth­ers in the entire city) in my city assum­ing the same pop­u­la­tion density?

    What is the ide­al spac­ing of hotspots on lev­el ground?

    Thanks

  22. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi James, any­one who want­ed to use IoT data could use your hotspots. Track­ing, envi­ron­men­tal vari­ables, inven­to­ry man­age­ment, etc. You’d earn HNT from the data that gets passed. You’d prob­a­bly be bet­ter off adding 3 hotspots to the city that already has them. Ide­al spac­ing on lev­el ground is prob­a­bly just meet­ing res 8 hex require­ments, say, 600m-1km apart. Depends on a ton of vari­ables, but that’d be where I’d start.

  23. James Cowin Avatar
    James Cowin

    Thanks for respond­ing so quick­ly Nik,

    As you men­tioned in one of your posts, if I keep read­ing I will find answers, which I did, like the 600‑1000 meters apart which I found. How­ev­er your answer of plac­ing hotspots in the oth­er city sur­prised me.

    Anoth­er ques­tion which unfor­tu­nate­ly wont real­ly help your USA read­ers but may be impor­tant to those like me, liv­ing in 3rd world coun­tries. In the USA, net­work speeds are in the 50–100Mbps range, how­ev­er down here a basic inter­net con­nec­tion could be as low as 3Mbps (of course there are faster, mine is 50 down/5 up) but is there a min­i­mum required inter­net con­nec­tion speed for a Heli­um Hotspot?

    James

  24. Tom DAngelo Avatar
    Tom DAngelo

    Hey Nik,

    Great info! Hop­ing to get your thoughts. I have a cou­ple of Bob­cats and am about a week in. With one of them, I am about 36ft up in an apart­ment. I am see­ing 15 aver­age wit­ness­es but earn­ing less than 1 HNT per day. I have a 9dbi com­ing witch I hope will help. Any thoughts on why such low earnings?

    Thanks. Tom

  25. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Tom, prob­a­bly due to a few fac­tors, most­ly around den­si­ty and the amount of “unique” cov­er­age you’re pro­vid­ing. Have you run any RF sims over on Heli­um Vision? The 9 dBi may decrease valid wit­ness­es. Have you looked at the Chal­lenge Receipt Analy­sis dash­board to see if your wit­ness­es are invalid?

  26. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    There is, but it’s pret­ty low. Bot­tom of this page. 🙂

  27. Tom D Avatar
    Tom D

    Thanks Nik. I have run some rf sce­nar­ios and it looked pret­ty good.

    Just ran the Chal­lenge receipt dash­board and showed “no results” for all categories.

    Chilly Car­rot Cuckoo

    Tom

  28. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Looks like you’re get­ting scaled at .5 and pro­vid­ing what I think of as “one-way non-use­ful cov­er­age”, which is a bum­mer, because you’re actu­al­ly expand­ing the net­work. It hap­pens when you have some­thing out on the edge of a net­work that’s only com­mu­ni­cat­ing to hotspots that all already see each oth­er, and not “con­nect­ing” two large regions. I have a sim­i­lar hotspot that I’ve got to move.

  29. SEAN O CONNELL Avatar
    SEAN O CONNELL

    How do I solve the hotspot ‘being relayed‘ issue using wifi ? Would Eth­er­net solve it and does this decrease my earnings.

  30. Tony Avatar
    Tony

    Hey Nik,

    I live in a 3 acre farm land far away from the city. I have decid­ed to pur­chase 20 heli­um min­ers and place it 300m apart from one anoth­er. Would this work in my favor?

  31. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    You’re going to need more than 3 acres to place them all 300m apart, plus you’ll need to have it’s own sep­a­rate con­nec­tion to the inter­net. Think about adding val­ue to the net­work vs just pro­vid­ing non-use­ful coverage.

  32. SEAN O CONNELL Avatar
    SEAN O CONNELL

    Hi Nik, which is more use­ful in earn­ing HNT — Lora end node cov­er­age or wit­ness proof of coverage ?

  33. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Sean, for earn­ing HNT it’ll be PoC.

  34. James Graves Avatar
    James Graves

    Hi Nik,
    I am look­ing to buy a cou­ple of these…I have no nodes in my area (Suf­folk, VA). I am going to try buy­ing two and putting one in my FIL’s house, about 5 miles away and see what hap­pens. If I can make mon­ey with it, I might see if I can clue some oth­er folks in the area in to this to get some nodes built out-will just two nodes man­age to get anything?
    Also, what do you think of build­ing out nodes in the coun­try? I have a lot of friends about 15 miles out­side of town with sev­er­al hun­dred acres…we could build out nodes in that area, as well-I’m just not sure if nodes out in the coun­try serve any kind of pur­pose. It is just a few miles from Franklin/Petersburg/Suffolk, so-maybe?

  35. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi James, typ­i­cal­ly you want your hotspot to be able to see at least 4 oth­er hotspots. That being said, hav­ing 2 is 10x bet­ter than hav­ing 1.

    As far as build­ing out in rur­al areas, that can work well although you have to be pret­ty care­ful about dis­tance and line of sight for pure earn­ings pur­pos­es. Over the long run, hotspots that are placed with an eye towards grow­ing WUPU cov­er­age will do the best.

  36. MICHAEL Avatar
    MICHAEL

    Hel­lo I live in a town of 12000 with no min­ers. Wad look­ing at plac­ing 5 to 7 around town close enough they could see each oth­er but not clos­er then 800m. Would that enough to get cash back on min­ers in a cou­ple months? Thanks

  37. MICHAEL Avatar
    MICHAEL

    Hel­lo I was look­ing at plac­ing 5 to 7 in my area. There are no oth­ers there could I make my mon­ey back on the min­ers in a cou­ple months? Thanks

  38. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Michael, it depends on what the price of HNT is when you get them, and how many min­ers are on the net­work. It’s pret­ty rea­son­able (though NOT a guar­an­tee!) that they’ll pay off with­in a few months if they’re all opti­mal­ly placed.

  39. Nicolas Avatar
    Nicolas

    Hey, i live in Dubai..i checked the heli­um map and i noticed that near­est hotspot is 12 Km away from my appartment..and i think im alone in the city where all the min­ers are in down­town dubai (14km far ) so how much i could prob­a­bly make a month ?? Is it woth it?

  40. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Nic, with the clos­est min­ers 14 km away I would­n’t expect top tier earn­ings, but it may sur­prise you. As far as how much per month, I don’t think any­one can give any kind of accu­rate answer. Your best bet is to look for oth­er min­ers with the same posi­tion as yours and see how they’re doing, then aver­age that out. Heli­um seems to pay off faster than damn near any oth­er project I’ve seen, but it’s not as fast today (July 19th, 2021) as it was even a month ago.

  41. zaid Avatar
    zaid

    hi nick
    im from pakistan
    there are only two hotspots near my city which are almost 80km away from my city
    would it be worth in my city for hnt mining

  42. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Zaid, prob­a­bly not worth it with just one. You *might* hit them, but you’re bet­ter off putting up at least 2 (and bet­ter, 5) yourself.

  43. MacStone Avatar
    MacStone

    Hi,
    I am still try­ing to wrap my head around how it works but, am I cor­rect in assum­ing that if nobody uses the WiFi pro­vid­ed, you don’t earn anything ??
    Im just won­der­ing as the clos­est to me is 25km dis­tance and I was con­sid­er­ing set­ting up 4–6 units in my town where there is noth­ing going on. (pop­u­la­tion of rough­ly 9000).
    Any comments/advice would be appreciated.

    Cheers

  44. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Nope, earn­ings are only part­ly based on the data you processed. To be clear, you’re not pro­vid­ing “WiFi”, you’re pro­vid­ing a dif­fer­ent type of cov­er­age (IoT cov­er­age via LoRa). You’ll earn the most by your hotspots “talk­ing” to oth­er hotspots, prov­ing that they are where they say they are. 4–6 units is a good num­ber to earn opti­mal­ly as long as they have good spac­ing and Line of Sight to each other.

  45. James Cowin Avatar
    James Cowin

    Hi Nik,

    With respect to earn­ings I ran across two USA hotspots that have me thor­ough­ly confused…

    sneaky-gold­en orca……. 40 wit­ness­es and only 3 HNT for a month

    and

    sharp-grape-grasshopper…..zero wit­ness and 67 HNT for a month.

    Obvi­ous­ly it hap­pens, but could you offer an expla­na­tion as to why?

    Jim

  46. Buster Avatar
    Buster

    I’m at the bot­tom of a hill my Bob­cat Min­er is 20 Meters up on my roof with a 8dbi antenna .
    I’m show­ing two hotspots near­by, will I be able to wit­ness them if its show­ing them near by on the Cov­er­age Map data?
    Its is also show­ing that I sent Data I trans­ferred a data packet.
    my hot spot is.
    Rest­less Rose­wood Cat

    I hope I’m not a lone wolf.

  47. Buster Avatar
    Buster

    If you don’t wit­ness right away are you pret­ty much a lone wolf?

  48. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Hi Buster, nope, it can take time to wit­ness. Remem­ber, you’ve got to wit­ness a bea­con from anoth­er hotspot. Hotspots can bea­con once a day and some­times much less, so if you only have a few near­by you may have to wait a few days to build up your wit­ness list.

  49. Nik Avatar
    Nik

    Good news that you’re trans­fer­ring data pack­ets; you’re a use­ful part of the net­work! Wit­ness­ing oth­er hotspots is a func­tion of line of sight; if your anten­na can “see” their anten­na, you’ll wit­ness ’em.

  50. Frank Avatar
    Frank

    Hey Nik, is there a bet­ter way I can con­tact you with fur­ther questions?

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