- Rev.001-first posted on 2022-02-05
Recently I started to mine on Helium network, which is one of the pioneer projects for WEB 3.0.
The bonus obtained from mining is Helium network token, with a token symbol of HNT. Current price of HNT is USD 27 per token.
Maybe I am late to this HNT mining party because now the profit is not that great, but I still wanted to share my experience for those who consider starting mining HNT as well.
My experience would include:
- Where to purchase Helium miners
- Where to purchase miner accessories
- Where to set your Helium miners
- Where to get help when issues occur
- How is profit like recently
Firstly, where to purchase Helium miners:
There are lots of brand out of Helium miners there including Bobcat, Linxdot, SyncroBit, Nebra, RAKwireless, SenseCap and etc. If you are in North America, please be advised to choose 915 MHz.
Some of the brands would only take crypto-currency payments, such as Bobcat. This is not user-friendly to those who are not quite familiar with cryptos. However, if you are quite savvy with USDC payment, you can try pre-order Bobcat Helium miner at this link https://shop.bobcatminer.com/products/bobcat-miner-300.
For Linxdot, you can pre-order with credit card, but be advised the charge will be in Euro so there might be foreign transaction fees on top of the price. Ship date is June 2022 if you order as of 2022-02-04. You can get 3% off with my referral link: https://store.linxdot.com/?ref=pinance.ca or enter coupon code pinance.ca at check out.
For SyncroBit, you can also pre-order with credit card, but be advised the charge will be in USD so there might be foreign transaction fees on top of the price. Ship date is Q2 2022 if you order as of 2022-02-04. You can get USD 25 off with my referral link: https://shop.syncrob.it/?ref=pinance.ca or enter coupon code pinance.ca at check out.
For Nebra, they have two versions https://www.nebra.com/products/helium-indoor-hotspot-miner?ref=pinance.ca and https://www.nebra.com/products/nebra-hnt-indoor-hotspot-miner-rock-pi-version?ref=pinance.ca, but both are out of stock. You can sign up for their restock notifications. Use these two links for 3% off at check out. Please be advised the charge will be in GBP so there might be foreign transaction fees on top of the price.
For RAKwireless, it is better to sign up their email waiting list on their official website: https://getmntd.com/, so they will email you about future stock availability. I personally got MNTD miner in Jan 2022.
Secondly, where to purchase miner accessories:
After ordering the miner, you might want to order some miner accessories (if you are in North America, choose those 915 MHz compatible ), such as
- an antenna and extension cable to connect the antenna and the miner
- an antenna mount
- a lightning arrestor
I tried to purchase antenna and cable on Aliexpress, but the they never arrived. So I had to re-order from Amazon. This the one ordered: https://amzn.to/3BMvEKt. Another good example would be this: https://amzn.to/3Uk3kGD. Or just search Helium Antenna on Amazon. Basically buy a higher dBi antenna with at least 16 ft long cable since you want to place your antenna at higher elevation.
Antenna mount can also be purchased from Amazon, if you prefer to fix the mount to a flat surface, you can order this one: https://amzn.to/3qMil6m or if the mount is fixed to a pole, then consider ordering this one: https://amzn.to/3LqQjH3. Or just search Antenna Mount on Amazon. Maybe your local hardware store would carry similar stuff at lower price, so try your local hardware store first.
I did however successfully purchased a lightning arrestor from Aliexpress, but it might be a hit-and-miss. To avoid the wait and frustration, I would still recommend ordering from Amazon. I think this one is pretty good: https://amzn.to/3QRYcqo
Thirdly, where to set your Helium miner:
Visit this website: https://explorer.helium.com/ to see how many miners are already place in your neighborhood. If there are already too many miners in your “hex” then the profit is not going to be promising.
If you want to dig into details, then visit this website: https://app.hotspotty.net/hotspots/, where lot of more details are provided. Pay attention to the reward scale factor in your neighborhood, basically this reward scale will largely determine how your profit will be like.
Where to get help when issues occur:
The best place to get support is from Discord communities. This the link for official Helium Discord: https://discord.gg/helium.
Each manufacture of Helium miner should have their Discord community as well, for example, if you bought RAKwireless / MNTD Helium miner, you can join RakStars Discord: https://discord.com/invite/Tk9VGRFG4w to submit help ticket.
Please also feel free to leave a comment and I can help as much as I can. Cheers!
How is profit like recently:
My Helium miner started to work on 2022-01-03 and I was using the original antenna to begin with, so the profit was about 0.02 HNT per day (equals to about 0.7 Canadian dollar per day). Starting 2022-02-03, I got new antenna so the profit has improved to 0.1 HNT per day (equals to about 3.3 Canadian dollars per day). So I strongly recommend upgrading your antenna setup, since it quintupled my profits.
The total cost of the Helium miner, antenna &cable, lightning arrestor and hardware was about 830 Canadian dollars, which means I would break even in about 251 days.
At last, if you are interested in purchasing a Helium miner, please consider using my referral links and coupon code (pinance.ca):
https://store.linxdot.com/?ref=pinance.ca to get 3% off of a Linxdot miner
https://shop.syncrob.it/?ref=pinance.ca to get 25 USD off of a SyncroBit miner
https://www.nebra.com/?ref=pinance.ca to get 3% off of a Nebra miner