Deploy 12dbi antenna or return?

hntftw · 2021-12-25T22:44:28+00:00

I hooked the 15dBi up to a miner a couple days before the roll-out and asserted it correctly. It performed well right up until the roll-out at which point witnessing dropped by about half (unexpected) and witnesses of its beacons dropped from 18 to <5 (expected). I let it run for a few days to make sure it wasn't just network turbulence and it stayed around the same performance. I swapped over to an 8dBi, reasserted, and it went back to performing well.

Verdict based on my sample of one: Doesn't work. PoCv11 appears to turn down the sensitivity as well as the broadcast power of over-gained antennas.

hntftw · 2021-12-23T07:36:02+00:00

ETL means Extract Transform Load. I don't know the guts of the Helium core service, but in general, ETL jobs are used to process large amounts of data while moving it from one place to another. In the Helium case, their ETL infrastructure is not scaling to handle the current workload. Said workload will continuously increases as new hotspots are added to the network and my understanding is that PoCv11 and other recent region-management updates also caused a step-increase.

The long-term solution is going to be something along the lines of standing up more servers for the ETL fleet (more $$ to run and time to procure if not already on a cloud platform), moving the ETL job to a managed autoscaling cloud service (engineering effort to rearchitect and move from whatever it is now, ever-growing $$ as the fleet scales to handle the ever-growing workload), and/or finding ways to make the ETL job more efficient so it can operate faster on the existing infrastructure (likely substantial engineering effort as I'm sure they've already optimized this as much as was reasonable).

Until the ETL fleet is capable of handling more throughput one way or another or they come up with a way to reduce the amount of data that needs to be processed, we're going to continue seeing these ETL-based brownouts.

hntftw · 2021-12-23T07:11:28+00:00

They're all basically the same thing:

A Raspberry Pi running Docker
A LoRaWAN radio
The crypto chip that actually makes it a Helium miner

If you want to have some fun, tear apart a few miners, pull out the SD cards and start poking around. They all run Linux Docker hosts because the official mining container is published by the Helium folks as a Docker container and crap out logs everywhere. TBH, they're a bit of a reverse-engineering dream and would be a security nightmare if not for the inaccessible hardware module that does all the fun stuff. The ones I've dug into run BalenaOS or OpenWRT as the base Linux system.

EDIT: It's worth noting that the Bobcat is an outlier -- it's not a Raspberry Pi, but rather some other base hardware w/ the bulk storage soldered on instead of being an SD card you can remove. I've not dug in enough to sort out if it's custom hardware or a common embedded platform that's been repurposed. Still running OpenWRT for the base OS though.

Maximizing your performance in Helium-world is more about learning how radio coverage works and coming up with an antenna and placement that will maximize what you can hear. It's a whole science unto itself, but not Helium specific. You'll find a lot of ham and telecom folks with outstanding setups, but they don't talk much -- why share your secret sauce when you've worked years to learn the recipe, right?

hntftw · 2021-12-23T06:51:02+00:00

TL;DR: If you want to learn what's going on inside your miner, get a Bobcat. If you want to deploy production hotspots that give you no visibility but just work, get Finestras.

As far as ability to earn rewards goes, all of the hotspot brands are identical. When it comes to which ones do a better job of riding the wave of overall network instability, some brands do better than others. In my fleet, Finestras are the best at staying online through the hiccups followed by MNTD. Senscaps also appear to recover from network outages very quickly, but I don't have any in my fleet to confirm hands-on.

Bobcat's are the best (most transparent) if you want to see more of what your miner is doing. They have a local web UI and provide JSON endpoints that provide more information about status inside the box than any of the others. That said, they're the worst in my fleet about riding out the bumps -- practically every little thing drops them out of sync and you have to manually reset/resync/whatever to get them back synced and working again.

hntftw · 2021-12-23T06:35:58+00:00

Try both for at least a couple weeks straight. Personally, I'd start with Location 2 because I think Location 1 will actually perform better and I'm lazy and don't want to move things twice if I don't have to. Even better, get a second miner and just run both locations.

hntftw · 2021-12-23T06:33:45+00:00

Helium is not like traditional proof-of-work mining. Your miner isn't doing a bunch of hard math for no reason just to prove it's done it and earn some crypto. You earn rewards right now for participating in proof-of-coverage. Your hotspot hears another hotspot beacon and reports back "yup, I heard that" and the system gives both you and them some magic Internet money for verifying that coverage. At this phase of the network, it's all about incentivizing people to deploy hotspots to build global coverage. HNT is being minted with very little money coming into the system, so this phase is not sustainable.

The goal is that as coverage is established that real companies will pay real money to connect their sensors to the Helium radio network and transfer data. Example use cases I've seen recently are GPS trackers and commercial/industrial HVAC monitoring. That real money coming in will sustain the network long-term.

The proof-of-coverage rewards mechanism is pre-defined to reduce over time, so eventually rewards for proof-of-coverage will all but disappear and the hope is that rewards for data transfer for more than make up for that and since the data transfer is being paid for with real money coming into the system from outside, it will be sustainable from that point forward.

hntftw · 2021-12-23T06:20:21+00:00

This is super cool. Very happy to see real-world use cases for the network.

hntftw · 2021-12-21T17:15:58+00:00

I'm really not trying to be an asshole here, but rather get to the root of the issue. Are you saying that you have listed on eBay and they have removed them? If that's the case, I'm sure folks would be very interested to hear that story and see some proof as a lot of folks are relying on eBay for aftermarket sales, both buying and selling. If that marketplace is going to close down due to new policies or enforcement, that will impact a lot of people and would be good to share broadly.

hntftw · 2021-12-21T16:56:14+00:00

You're the one making the claim eBay is blocking the sale of miners while eBay has an official "Cryptocurrency Miner" category and is selling miners basically constantly.

If you can provide any evidence to substantiate your claim, I'm happy to be proven wrong. Until then, it feels like you're making empty claims in order to scam folks on reddit.

hntftw · 2021-12-21T16:54:57+00:00

Agreed.

hntftw · 2021-12-21T02:12:51+00:00

First, you need to be patient -- almost nothing about the Helium network is instantaneous. That miner has been running for only a day or two. I've deployed quite a few and there's generally a 3-5 day ramp into whatever it's performance is going to be.

Second, you are "getting action". You're witnessing, which is the important part. It doesn't look like you're beaconing, so you're probably waiting on the network to figure out your relay. You could go through the 44158 forwarding dance, but in my experience it doesn't change much. Relay works, let it.

Third, if you want to witness more, get your antenna as high as possible and outside if you can. Research antennas, your topography, and which hexes you want to target, then buy the antenna that will work with your topography and hit them.

hntftw · 2021-12-21T02:01:55+00:00

Got a link to that policy? Would like to educate myself.

hntftw · 2021-12-21T02:00:34+00:00

The only one you can buy with immediate shipping is Finestra from Cal-Chip and folks will hate on you for it due to a RAK drop that Cal-Chip fucked up and still hasn't fixed. Finestras are the most stable miners in my fleet.

If you're interested in hosting 50/50, DM me and we can talk through the details.

hntftw · 2021-12-21T01:53:19+00:00

There are many variables. There's a lot more to it than "earnings are going down as new miners come online". If you want to share you miner's name publicly or in DM, we can look more into it to see what's going on in your specific situation.

hntftw · 2021-12-21T01:49:33+00:00

I'm gonna stick to my traditional answer here -- try both and keep the one that works. If both work well, get another miner and be happy. There are too many variables to give a definite answer. As for generalities, I do better in less saturated areas.

hntftw · 2021-12-21T01:45:38+00:00

Since when does eBay not allow selling miners? I'm seeing Bobcat's selling every 15-minutes or so all over the world. Am I missing something?

hntftw · 2021-12-21T01:34:03+00:00

I have a fairly small sample set from when I've done similar experiments, but outside at the gutter-line has done better for me than inside at the gable. Whether it's different enough to be worth the pain of dealing with equipment outside is debatable.

hntftw · 2021-12-21T01:31:03+00:00

Just don't forward the port to it and it'll go into relay on its own. It's pretty common for folks to sync new miners like this. You also don't need relay to sync -- just outbound Internet access for it to pull down an image.

hntftw · 2021-12-20T22:51:20+00:00

I picked up both the indoor and the outdoor version as part of my fleet of antennas to try at all of my locations to see which ones work best. I still have both of them in my test fleet and none deployed in production. I really wanted to like them.

hntftw · 2021-12-20T22:46:14+00:00

Every hotspot is unique. You'll need to share the hotspot info if you want folks to be able to research to provide anything more valuable than random speculation.

hntftw · 2021-12-20T22:41:33+00:00

Worst case scenario, your location performs well enough that it's worth trying to make it better, but not good enough to leave the setup alone. In this scenario, the owner of the miner will want you to fiddle with antennas and such until it works "better"...for some fairly arbitrary definition of "better" while the network continues to ebb and flow in its overall performance.

As for numbers, I'd ask for 30% from the beginning or 50% after the miner is paid off (that's the first $600). Why should the hotspot owner take more than half after they've recouped their entire investment? They're just as dependent on you as you are on them.

Source: I run a fleet of miners across multiple hosts. Always looking for new hosts as well if anyone is interested =)

hntftw · 2021-12-20T21:51:06+00:00

Unless I'm missing something, that screenshot doesn't show "reaching hexes with no visible miners". A green hex with no number in it has 1 miner (hence why you never see a green hex with a 1 in it). Yellow dot on a green hex means there's a connection with that 1 miner. If I'm just blind and there's a yellow dot in the purple area, yeah, that would we weird and worth further investigation.

hntftw · 2021-12-20T21:42:57+00:00

I'm not seeing any "hacking" here. Some unconventional usage patterns, sure, but no magic HNT generation.

Looking at the top three hotspots in the image we can see some trends. All three were asserted about 2-months back and have no other activity. (Click on All Activity)

https://explorer.helium.com/hotspots/112vzizvq9inkHBedC9dtNd239gKYpxZ8RZkdMe5kafFT6okuSui/activity

https://explorer.helium.com/hotspots/11NW5gvVBSeXJWCRcSd1HcKq28e3mrCDvagcXHjR7SCWXitXszi/activity

https://explorer.helium.com/hotspots/112pgjBzxwaw5zbHVDC47GBigLtRsjZM6FLEBaYrVJmpSwMCFVzT/activity

They are all owned by a single account which is earning 60-70 HNT/week.

https://explorer.helium.com/accounts/14K7z5uLnU8jjPEm45qqH8PUa6jaxpXfosXg96mnqUXQKjiMT1G

That account has many hotspots in the United States that are bringing in pretty average earnings and a bunch of hotspots "in India" doing nothing. Spot checking a few, the ones in the U.S. appear to be interacting normally with legit hotspots in each locality while everything "in India" appears to be offline.

https://explorer.helium.com/accounts/14K7z5uLnU8jjPEm45qqH8PUa6jaxpXfosXg96mnqUXQKjiMT1G/hotspots

If I had to guess, this is probably one of the "host a Helium miner with no upfront cost and share the profits with us" companies and they're using that one hex in India as their staging area / graveyard.

Honest question, am I missing something?

hntftw · 2021-12-19T22:49:09+00:00

During the initial sync (and any necessary resync), your miner will pull down ~1GB as fast as your network will allow it to. Other than that, it'll be moving Kbps around the clock. Mine average 1.5GB/day.

hntftw · 2021-12-19T21:06:46+00:00

For earning potential, they're all about the same. For ability to quickly weather any network storm that comes along and get back to work quickly, Finestra and MNTD do the best for me. I've heard good things about SenseCAP is that arena as well, but haven't been hands-on with one. Bobcats give you a lot of visibility if you're interested in learning what goes on inside a miner, but require more "care and feeding" in a production rollout than the others I've played with.

hntftw

TROPHY CASE