The Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid with Your Helium Hotspot

So you just found out about Heli­um and want to crush it with your hotspot deploy­ment? First, remem­ber WUPU. That stands for Wide-Unique-Prove­able-Use­ful cov­er­age. WUPU is what makes for a reli­ably high earn­ing hotspot. Here are the top 5 things that go against WUPU. Let’s start with the worst thing:

1 — Overcrowding

Putting your hotspot in the same res 8 hex as anoth­er hotspot WITHOUT pro­vid­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter cov­er­age is a recipe for low earn­ings and wast­ed effort. I’ve gone into this in depth over in the Rough Guide.

I’m see­ing a lot of folks who are just putting it in their house because they don’t have any oth­er place to put it, even if some­one else is already in the same res 8 hex! This goes against the first U in WUPU, which is Unique. That is…non-optimal if you want high­er rewards. If you want to crush it with your deploy­ment, focus 95% of your efforts on the place­ment aspect.

2 — Focusing on the Antenna

Most new hotspot own­ers go through some vari­a­tion of “What’s the best anten­na, mon­ey is no object?” Please read the post on anten­nas to learn why that’s not a high-earn­ing ques­tion. You might think you’re going for the W in WUPU, which is Wide, but many times you’ll over­buy an anten­na, get­ting a com­pressed sig­nal that trig­gers anti-gam­ing wit­ness inval­i­da­tion mea­sures OR goes far beyond the local hotspots you should be targeting.

3 — Not doing your research

You end up wast­ing a ton of your own time and that of oth­ers by ask­ing a ques­tion in the forums that you could have answered far more thor­ough­ly and prof­itably had you used a Search func­tion. Trust me, you are not the first per­son with your ques­tion. Type it into Google exact­ly as you’d ask an expert and add “Heli­um Hotspot” at the end, or type the key words into the Heli­um Dis­cord chan­nel and scroll through the results. 

4 — Not getting your antenna outside and up at elevation

This is a clas­sic mis­take. Look, Heli­um is a HUGE oppor­tu­ni­ty, but that oppor­tu­ni­ty will only exist as a tremen­dous one for hotspot own­ers who pro­vide WUPU. If you put your anten­na in a win­dow down low, you are pro­vid­ing a very small area of use­ful cov­er­age, it will be more dif­fi­cult to ver­i­fy it because your sig­nal will be weak, and if there are any oth­er hotspots around you you’ll prob­a­bly be dupli­cat­ing their efforts.

Relat­ed but usu­al­ly not com­mon with peo­ple who want to crush is the lone wolf deploy­ment, where some­one puts in a hotspot that through topog­ra­phy or dis­tance can’t con­nect with any oth­er hotspot. Even if they’re pro­vid­ing Wide, Unique, and Use­ful cov­er­age, it’s not Prove­able, so it does­n’t real­ly count. Hey, I don’t make the rules (even though I think the Prove­able rule is an excel­lent one.)

5 — Not connecting via a solid (usually ethernet cable) connection.

This is a small­er mis­take but a source of frus­tra­tion. The hotspots so far released don’t have super strong WiFi recep­tion, so they end up going offline, or miss­ing a sig­nal, or just dis­con­nect­ing. Save your­self a TON of trou­ble and just hard­line the thing in. If your con­nec­tion is unre­li­able, you’re not real­ly pro­vid­ing Use­ful coverage.

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All of these mis­takes are as com­mon as they are avoid­able. If you just remem­ber WUPU and apply it to every step of your deploy­ment you can avoid them. 

With about 10 hours of seri­ous read­ing or study you’ll be in the top 1% of knowl­edge­able hotspot own­ers in the entire ecosys­tem, and you won’t make these. With that much study, not only can you avoid those mis­takes, you’ll eas­i­ly side­step all the oth­er low-earn­ing pit­falls that many hotspot own­ers stum­ble into. 

Have a look through this blog, read­ing it will be a use­ful addi­tion to your 10 hours. I’ve writ­ten about how to opti­mize your hotspot place­ment, which anten­na is best, how much you can expect to earn, and more.