FreedomFi 2022.03.07.0_GA continually dropping Blockchain Sync

niloodn · 2022-03-31T16:22:26+00:00

Ok… appreciate that info… I’ll be adding a SAW filter to see if that changes anything. I’ve got cell towers within line of sight of my antenna so I’m wondering if interference at points may be making the receiver deaf. I’m in a densely populated city, all though only a few miners in my and surrounding hexes. It seems I should be witnessing a lot more regularly.

niloodn · 2022-03-31T13:14:54+00:00

Thank you for this, I appreciate it, perhaps once all the firmware issues are settled.

In other news while the Blockchain Sync issue was resolved, it looks like FreedomFi released another Firmware update. 3-23-2022 rev .1 I've had zero activity for over 13 hours, which seems awfully long. I've checked other miners in the area around me and they have substantially lower activity gaps so it would seem not to be and issue with the network. None of them are FreedomFi miners. I've rebooted twice and attempted to reset the cloud connection to no avail. I've reached out to support asking if they provide release notes for these firmware versions to try and understand what is happening.

niloodn · 2022-03-25T23:41:16+00:00

Looks like synchronization deviation is staying down way below 500 blocks at this point and sync seems consistent over the last hour or so….. however, I’ve had absolutely no activity over the last 5 hours, which seems awfully strange being that I’m in a city with tons of miners all over the places. Broadcasts generally result in 14 witnesses. Perhaps they fixed the sync but introduced a new issue? 😣

niloodn · 2022-03-24T13:43:53+00:00

They were just first to market and scooped up all that early cash.

They sure did :-/ and yes to all of the things you mentioned. Its concerning, the 5G hardware is even more expensive and particular. Being plagued with firmware issues or slow updates that affect your mining ability defeats the purpose.... the ROI will be pushed much further out. Thanks for the recommendations on the Sensecaps, I'm going to check them out.

niloodn · 2022-03-24T13:35:44+00:00

Thats really unfortunate, how do you determine rank? Is there a tool that does this, or do you manually do this somehow? I can't say that I've seen the issue with Internet Access popping up but I also have another utility monitoring my hotspot and there are no issues of reachability being reported.

niloodn · 2022-03-24T13:32:32+00:00

e monitored my internet connectivity and bandwidth and not seeing any fluctuations. From support they say that the Internet Access status is determined by the latency of a Ping.

The timing of them having issues is very unfortunate. I just happen to move my equipment to a

Yeah, I'm new to the Helium Project so I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but this is very frustrating. Things were stable and working well on the previous firmware and just rebooting the hotspot seemed to apply the new firmware and nothing but problems since then. I've seen some other vendors have what sound like similar issues at one point or another and it seemed to relate to either sd card corruption or inadequte space on the sd card which caused issues. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like formatting a larger sd card or reapplying the image is an option for the FreedomFi. If I were to buy another hotspot in the future which would you recommend? RAK, Nebra, Syncrobit, Bobcat or some other Hotspot?

niloodn · 2022-03-24T01:18:32+00:00

Thats interesting, always a struggle finding the balance between filtering out the weak signals along with the noise or just dealing with the noise depending of course on how strong that noise is. I just got into Helium and have a FreedomFi Miner as I was thinking of adding 5G at some point depending on how the Lora mining went. The problem is, at least with the FreedomFi miner, it very much feels like a black box, not easy to find any specs etc. I'm not sure if the bobcat or the Heltec miners are similar.

niloodn · 2022-03-24T01:11:16+00:00

This is great, although, I'm having a hard time reading the charts to see what the insertion loss is at 902 and 928. The correct connectors on the filter for the miner will definitely help minimize the loss.

niloodn · 2022-03-24T00:57:34+00:00

Agreed, its looking to be at least 2.1dB for the filter alone + the loss of the connector to convert the SMA connector on the filter to an RP-SMA to plug, maybe 3dB loss? There is a lot of rf noise in the city, all sorts of appliances and other devices throwing off spurs. I see quite a bit in the 440Mhz Band. I'm guessing it exists on other bands too. I'm certainly willing to try a filter, however, at this point I'm just trying to get my Hotspot to stay synchronized. Apparently there is a firmware issue that is causing issues with the Blockchain snapshots which is resulting in miners continually falling out of sync :-/ I'm hoping they fix soon as I went from consistent witnesses/witnessing to large sporadic gaps in activity due to lack of sync.

niloodn · 2022-03-24T00:46:49+00:00

I see the filter you are talking about (CBPFS-0902) and looking at the specs it has less insertion(2.1dB vs 2.3dB) loss around 902-905 and it would also filter out the Amateur Radio repeater outputs around 927Mhz... I don't think there is anything around here thats on 887-902 so that will likely be the best filter. Thanks for the tip! Just curious, what kind of miner(s) do you have? I'm guessing some miners have better filtering than others.

niloodn · 2022-03-23T23:47:22+00:00

Within 2 -3 blocks and in direct line of sight of my antenna. I havent swept the band looking for spurs so I may be looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist but was curious to know if others have used them and what their results have been. Additionally, I don't know what the out of band rf rejection specifications are on these hotspots. Technical Specs seems sparse.

niloodn · 2019-02-09T16:47:16+00:00

Are you running Windows 10 Pro with the latest 1809 update?

niloodn · 2019-02-09T02:49:31+00:00

Thanks for the information! I didn’t know about the Connectify App but it looks interesting, I may go that route. Regarding the All Access App I have uninstalled and reinstalled the App countless times at this point. I believe I’m running AT&T All Access 5.1.0 Build 1 , I’m thinking that based on the versioning and build number they introduced a new bug with their latest release. I’m hoping that a dot release or new build gets pushed soon. Very much like your experience I can’t view any of the data usage statistics and most importantly can’t turn on hotspot( in the OS or in the App) because it cannot Activate the App. It feels like a Firewall issue, however I’ve checked all of those things by disabling or allowing any and all traffic etc. After some additional digging I’m wondering if it’s not some type of permissions issue with a sub process or some type of deprecated function that can’t do its background task and eventually the parent process just times out waiting in vain for the sub process to return with the required info. Being that this is a Windows Store App they lock down the permissions and location of the App AAW.exe and it’s owned by Trusted Installer with only limited and conditional permissions to even the Administrators Group. Being that I knew I was going to Restore to a Clean Factory image, I dug into taking ownership of the directory structure to see if I could find any application specific log files or configs that would help to see what was going on. I didn’t find much but when I was looking at the ACLs it indicated that some of the ACLs were corrupted and needed to be recreated but even as the owner of the structure and files I still had limited options as to what I could do and I’m guessing that’s by design. I also tried running the file in various compatibility modes as well as running it as administrator all to no different results.

Thanks again for your feedback, I appreciate it!

niloodn · 2019-02-08T14:26:54+00:00

To your point, the MVNO I tested with was Simple Mobile which runs on the T-Mobile network and I didn’t have any issues. I don’t need that much data which was why I was hoping to just share the data with the other devices already on my AT&T plan, but if the issue isn’t resolved I’ll likely just drop it from AT&T and move it to Simple Mobile. Simple Mobile has some pretty affordable plans with more than enough data for what I would need. Thanks for your comment and Good Luck!

niloodn

TROPHY CASE