Helium Line Of Sight Tools / RF Simulation HNT Mining Guide

There is a lot of people mining Helium but HNT hotspot mining needs tools! Here is your Helium Line of Sight Tools Guide and I have also included a guide to the many RF Simulation tools that are out there.

First, a common Helium Miner has two things to have a good setup. Height. And Location. Forget “what antenna do I need”, it all comes down to LOCATION and HEIGHT. What’s around you? That’s where an online line of sight tool will help you “see” your terrain and all that’s around you. And the LoS (line of sight) tools that are online are plentiful.

https://www.scadacore.com/tools/rf-path/rf-line-of-sight/

Very easy LoS tool, you put in your location (have to drag the icons) and it will show you exactly the terrain from location A to B.

https://www.solwise.co.uk/wireless-elevationtool.html

Same concept. There’s plenty more but these are just a couple of the many ways you can see how good (or bad) the line of sight will be from your antenna height. You’d be surprised how NOT FLAT your landscape is! You could even do it in Google Earth if you wanted to. I’m not that skilled!

To do Helium RF Simluations, make sure you’re using 900Mhz as your frequency when performing any modelling as this is the band that Helium uses.

https://hotspotrf.com/

It’s a pay service, but it will predict what your RF coverage would be using your specific input. (height, antenna gain, etc.)

https://app.helium.vision/

That’s very good as well. There’s tons of tools out there… One thing about this, it’s physics. (beyond the issues with the underlying blockchain, etc.) RF at this frequency is about line of sight and basic physics rules prevail. Just putting an antenna on a 200′ mast/tower won’t help you if your hill/ridge is well beyond that. There’s also things like having enough runway for the transmitter to “form the beam” – so with a lower dBi antenna, you might be able to refract your way over some hills as long as the hills aren’t immediately on top of the RF source. Don’t have an immediate structure, tree, hill in front of the signal – give it time to form and maybe with any luck, you’ll get some signal that will go around it. Again, this isn’t rocket science. Just do some digging, some learning, watch youtube videos, google is your friend, and remember this all takes time. Helium especially is slow and nothing is immediate. Learning about the underlying RF aspect follows suit.

This guide for the Milesight UG65 Helium Miner is brought to you by Dennis Crawford. To help pay for server hosting costs, if you are looking for outdoor helium deployment equipment, please consider using the Amazon Storefront which has various products to use in an outside HNT environment. Or, if you’d like here is the HNT donation wallet:

13kPLKyXAVwHwTTKy7GDS5pAgM3X2A8BoeEezhSs7ZTb6cLnfwN – never expected, but always appreciated!!