09/09/22: DAY 30: 5G $MOBILE: 639,641.68

I was delighted to see the Helium 5G Genesis period begin. The so-called Cellular Summer is underway. On Sunday August 15, 2022 I discovered there were three $MOBILE rewards posted to my Helium Wallet. To date, I have received 6 reward payments totaling 167,618.85 in Helium $MOBILE 5G Rewards.

What’s it worth?

That’s what we’d all like to know. The truth is it currently has no value assigned to it. My understanding is that the Helium Community must first vote and approve measures that will determine what the $MOBILE reward token will be worth. We do know that the $MOBILE tokens will be convertible to $HNT at a later date. Good enough for me.

08/12/22 30,460.60, 08/13/22 29,424.15, 08/14/22 28093.95, 08/15/22 27528.04, 08/16/22 26,504.62, 08/17/22 25,607.49

How 5G Hotspots Earn Helium MOBILE Tokens

The Helium Blockchain rewards 5G Hotspots for providing 5G wireless coverage and verifying the Helium Network. 5G Hotspots are rewarded in the Helium MOBILE Token.

During the Genesis Period, 5G Hotspots will begin to earn MOBILE by reporting their status via a “heartbeat”, an automatic process of reporting to the Helium Blockchain that the Small Cell Radio is online and registered with the SAS.

Genesis is the period during which Hotspot owners will be rewarded for providing 5G coverage with pre-mined MOBILE tokens. MOBILE tokens will be redeemable for HNT after the Genesis period ends.

Once a 5G Hotspot is completely deployed, you as the owner are not required to do anything else to earn MOBILE. Your 5G Hotspot will perform all of its activities on its own and will be rewarded for maintaining a valid connection to the SAS.

Emissions Curve

There will be a max supply of 250B (billion) MOBILE with issuance halvenings of every 2 years aligned with the HNT issuance halvenings. The first halving will occur on August 1, 2023, to align with HNT halving and will continue on a 2-year cycle afterward. This creates a “stub period” as defined by HIP 53: Mobile subDAO which will begin when normal emissions of MOBILE tokens begin (and MOBILE can be redeemed by HNT in the subDAO’s treasury). The date for this is currently TBD and dependent on core developers implementing the HNT token treasury and redemption transactions on the Helium Blockchain. This is defined as Phase 2 of HIP 51: Helium DAO for all new subDAOs.

Before normal emissions of MOBILE begin, HIP 51: Helium DAO defined an earlier launch of MOBILE tokens assigning a premine amount of MOBILE to the Helium Foundation. The Helium Foundation will work with the core developers to begin the Genesis period of MOBILE rewards. Genesis rewards will be paid out of the Foundation’s pre-mined MOBILE rewards pool. Read more about the pre-mine distribution here.

Currently, the Helium Foundation intends to issue 100M (million) tokens per day in the Genesis period, and it will be proportionally distributed to all active 5G Small Cell Radios as described below.

Small Cell Radio Reward Scaling

All properly installed and registered 5G Hotspots will earn rewards for participating on the Network. A rewards unit multiple is applied to the various Small Cell Radio models based on whether they are indoor or outdoor, as well as their power output, as follows:

Small Cell Radio Type	Reward Weight
High-Power Outdoor*	4.0x
Outdoor	2.5x
Indoor	1.0x

*Currently, the only High-Power Outdoor Radio is the Baicells Nova436H

Individual rewards per period are calculated as a proportion of the total weighted reward units.

Earnings Example

Earnings are calculated in 3 steps

• Calculate the Total Emissions Weight and Emissions Weight Ratio for each Small Cell Radio Type
• Each Small Cell Radio Type is allocated its ratio of the total rewards in the given epoch
• Each 5G Hotspot is proportionally rewarded from its respective rewards pool by Small Cell Radio Type
  • As an example, we can calculate the rewards for a 5G Hotspot in a single epoch assuming the following (the below numbers are examples and may not reflect actual deployed 5G Hotspots today):

• 100,000,000 MOBILE Rewarded per day
• 150 High-Power Outdoor 5G Hotspots earn rewards
• 800 Outdoor 5G Hotspots earn rewards
• 1,400 Indoor 5G Hotspots earn rewards
• 1 Small Cell Radio per 5G Hotspot (in real-world usage, multiple Small Cell Radios can be connected to a 5G Hotspot)

Total Rewards Units for Epoch

Calculate the Total Reward Points for a given epoch, by using the Reward Weight for each Small Cell Radio type.

In this example, the total rewards Points per epoch is 4,000 and the ratios are as follows:

  High-Power Outdoor Count (  150) * 4.0    =>      600   =>  0.15
+            Outdoor Count (  800) * 2.5    =>  + 2,000   =>  0.50
+             Indoor Count (1,400) * 1.0    =>  + 1,400   =>  0.35
-----------------------------------------       --------
                                                  4,000

Earnings per Small Cell Radio

Each Small Cell Radio is allocated its rewards based on the reward weight of the model.

Small Cell Reward = Daily Rewards * Reward Weight / Count of Small Cell Type

High-Power Outdoor  => 100,000,000 * 0.15 /   150 = 100,000 MOBILE per day
           Outdoor  => 100,000,000 * 0.50 /   800 =  62,500 MOBILE per day
            Indoor  => 100,000,000 * 0.35 / 1,400 =  25,000 MOBILE per day

DAY 58: #cellularsummer

Today my Helium 5G Small Cell hit the 1 Million+ mark in $MOBILE Token Rewards!

HISTORIC!

This new information will tell me which direction to point my CBRS Small Cell radio in order to provide the best (and most profitable) coverage. The new mapping tool shows my signal as a mere ‘average’ cell signal. See below.

I’m looking to achieve anywhere between a -50 to -79dbm signal, or 25.0 SNR. At these operating frequencies, obstructions degrade signal strength. So now the work begins to get pointed in the right direction, and eliminate all obstructions if possible.

Is this signal level attainable with an Indoor Small Cell?

We’re about to find out. Once I’m convinced I know where to point it, if I’m not at, or near enough to, my target signal strength, I’ll consider putting the indoor radio outdoors, in a weatherproof enclosure.

I’m also not ruling out the purchase of a high power Outdoor Small Cell. I’ll wait to see what the $MOBILE tokens are worth before I purchase anymore 5G radio equipment.

New Information

My 5G Small Cell Signal Strength: Hidden Green Mole -96dbm 9.2 SNR

What’s a Good Signal Strength for a Cell Phone?

If your outside signal ranges from:

Signal Strength	General Results
-50 to -79 dBm	Considered great signal (4 to 5 bars)
-80 to -89 dBm	Considered good signal (3 to 4 bars)
-90 to -99 dBm	Considered average signal (2 to 3 bars)
-100 to -109 dBm	Considered poor signal (1 to 2 bars)
-110 to -120 dBm	Considered very poor signal (0 to 1 bar)

I have plenty of room for improvement here.

MOBILE Proof-of-Coverage: The Road Ahead

Early in a network’s development, it is essential to reward builders for their efforts to provide initial deployments and test basic network operations at a meaningful scale. As such, HIP 51 and 53 proposed a Genesis period of Proof-of-Coverage (PoC) rewards on the MOBILE subDAO.

Over 6,500 small cells (at the time of this writing) have been deployed on the Helium 5G network and with this scale, some community members have correctly raised concerns about the quality of coverage on the network. The strength of the network is predicated on providing useful coverage for phones and other devices. A small cell’s rewards should be aligned with this ultimate goal of usefulness and differentiation from traditional mobile network deployments.

Over the course of the next 12 months, PoC rewards will evolve from allocating tokens for simply being online to identifying and rewarding useful coverage. Improving our identification of overly-dense deployments will also ensure that the network continues to grow in a healthy way and avoids early arbitrage of PoC rewards. As with all incentive based systems, this is an iterative process and the community should expect frequent updates.

These changes are being communicated well in advance to give current and future network builders the opportunity to optimize radio setups to help ensure they can yield rewards for delivering useful coverage.

Determining useful coverage and the impact on MOBILE PoC rewards will be based on a number of factors:

These factors will be rolled out in stages over the course of the next twelve months and explained in detail to ensure network builders can take concrete steps to plan or improve their setups.

Planned release: Implemented

Radio uptime data is a strong indicator for radio reliability, and as such is a key element of service-level agreements (SLA).

There are a variety of circumstances that can affect radios staying online, including power outages, extreme weather (for example, 300 radios were knocked offline during Hurricane Ian), and defective equipment.

Service providers need to understand the reliability of a particular radio before connecting a subscriber to that radio. Historical data of regular dropped connections, for example, could indicate that a radio would not meet the expected quality of service that a provider has guaranteed a subscriber.

During the Genesis period, rewards were issued based exclusively on data provided by the Spectrum Access System (SAS), and radios have not been penalized for intermittent outages.

Recently, along with heartbeat data, a preliminary algorithm was introduced that can track radio uptime.

As the network matures and competition among radio operators increases, if your radio uptime becomes significantly worse compared to peers, your rewards will decrease.

It is recommended that radio operators closely monitor their radio uptime data and take care to ensure that equipment remains online and in good operating condition.

Planned release: Q4 2022

In contrast to the IoT network, high throughput and low latency are crucial to the usefulness of a 5G network. As such, providing quality backhaul to 5G radios is key to the reliability of the network.

Recently, the Helium Explorer was updated to display statistics from backhaul speed testing. Initially this is just for informational purposes, but soon radios with acceptable speeds and latency will earn full rewards, and those with less reliable backhaul will receive fewer rewards.

Making sure your radio is connected to a low-latency, fast internet connection can help ensure your backhaul tests remain at an acceptable level to earn full rewards.

Planned release: Q4 2022

Obstructions indicate any objects or obstacles that might impede the path of a signal. The placement and direction of radios is critical, as CBRS signals do not travel well through walls or dense trees.

Quality of placement and radio direction means the difference between your signal traveling for several city blocks versus not traveling anywhere. In order to optimize for useful coverage, it is crucial that signal paths be clear and unimpeded as much as possible.

Here is what you need to know in order to optimize your radio’s location:

A properly functioning radio on the Helium 5G network continuously advertises its location, direction, beam width, and radiated power. This information, coupled with a number of geospatial data sources, can provide a 90% accurate estimate of realistic receive signal strength within the hexes (locations) surrounding your radio.

Take for example the data below for a 430H radio mounted on a small office roof in downtown Boulder:

Over the course of the next three months, users will see this data populated in the Helium Explorer, indicating how many of the surrounding hexes to which a given radio is able to provide coverage.

After the initial informational roll out, rewards will become a function of the number of hexes covered and the corresponding signal quality in those hexes. It will also be scaled to take into account geographic areas with too much coverage.

This is an ideal time to optimize radio placement and direction to ensure rewards are not affected as these changes start to come online. It is also a good time to start placing radios where coverage does not overlap. Although some amount of redundancy will help a network’s reliability, 5G coverage is significantly different from the LoRaWAN deployments that many are used to in the Helium ecosystem. Since spectrum is shared, too many radios in overlapping segments will limit the usefulness of the network in that area.

Planned release: Q1 2023

Building the largest, most useful 5G network is a goal of the MOBILE subDAO, but not all locations are created equal. Although network builders are able to set up radios anywhere, it’s important that these radios are deployed in areas that will have real usage. This is where Service Providers, like Helium Mobile, can help guide the “shape” of the network as it deploys more widely over the coming months and years.

Although the logistics of this functionality are still in development and we believe that a governance change needs to be proposed to support this economic change, we believe that Service Providers should be able to influence where radios could be deployed by increasing rewards for particular geographic areas depending on where their customers are frequently using service. By boosting these areas, the demand side of the network (real subscribers) can meet the supply side of small cell deployers.

Planned release: Q1 2023

Between the Spectrum Access System (SAS) Oracle, heartbeat data, obstruction data, and location-based optimization, the network will have a significant dataset to accurately and equitably incentivize useful coverage.

However, we know firsthand there will always be some amount of arbitrage when there is an incentive-based reward system. To that end, there is a plan to develop Helium mappers to act as enforcers of data validation on the network.

Mappers will roam the physical world and share PoC data as evidenced by their internal modems. This allows us to validate or invalidate the data collected by Oracles and automatically adjust rewards for those who are spoofing the network by broadcasting falsified data.

There will be two ways users can map the network:

1. With Spot: a dedicated mapper hardware, is capable of extremely efficient scanning for cells and will be the best way to earn mapping MOBILE rewards.
2. As a subscriber: Helium Mobile subscribers will be able to map the network from their phone on an opt-in basis using the Helium Mobile app. While the rewards will be less than mapping with Spot, there is no additional cost for subscribers to participate. Future service providers will also be able to offer this as a product feature for their subscribers.

Spot mapper beta availability is expected before the end of 2022, with broad availability rolling out early 2023.

As we enter this next phase of building and scaling the network, it is crucial that we shift our focus towards providing reliable and useful coverage on the Helium 5G network. We look forward to building this network together with Small Cell Deployers, Mappers, Subscribers, Service Providers, and the Helium community at large.

Helium 5G MOBILE Genesis tokens continue to stack up. Today marked 100 days of MOBILE Genesis.

How long will Genesis last, and what value will be assigned to the tokens? We still have a lot to look forward to!

10x Bandwidth Improvement

I had the same internet plan since first having the fiber service installed back in 2004. The 50Mbps speed was never an issue for browsing and common everyday ‘household’ use.

After installing the 5G CBRS Small Cell, the Helium network began providing speed test results, in an effort to develop coverage data etc. When the speed tests first began, small cell operators were notified that the results were not yet affecting rewards scale, but would, at some time in the future.

My speed tests were failing, as the minimum acceptable speed is 100Mbps, and (as you can see above) I barely had half that speed. I waited and watched, and without announcing any date for the reduction in rewards scaling to take effect, it took place, and I was caught short for a while. So, for about a week, I received only half as many MOBILE token rewards. Once I saw the degradation was in place, I ordered the 500/500Mbps and it took a week to install.

The full rewards scale was restored immediately as the 500Mbps service came online.

So here we are on day 100 of Helium 5G Genesis. No end in sight for the Genesis period at this point. I search for an end date everyday. Keep those tokens flowing!

Back To The Front

Helium has announced the 5G genesis period (aka #cellularsummer) will end in January 2023. I’m hoping to reach 2MM in accumulated tokens before the Genesis period comes to a close. Stacking 5G $MOBILE helium.com

Back To The Front

Upcoming: End of the Helium 5G $MOBILE Genesis Period

The Helium network has announced that the Helium 5G $MOBILE Genesis period will end in January 2023. Rewards paid for simply having a 5G radio ‘on the air’ will cease. The outline for 5G “Proof of Coverage” rewards has been introduced in the latest Helium Improvement Proposal (aka HIP 74) . This means I need to have a signal that neighboring 5G radios can hear.

A weatherproof enclosure will be required to mount the radio outdoors. It may be possible to earn higher rewards outdoors. A clear view of the horizon, or an unobstructed view of my target area will do the trick. I hope to realize significant improvement versus my current indoor location (facing out my second story window)

Outdoor High Power radios are the next step.

Let’s take this outside…

Before I purchase anymore 5G radio hardware, some comparisons need to be be made once the radio is outdoors.

I’ll point the radio to leverage the highest ‘user density’ area. The HIP 74 announcement addressed this issue in the form of a new console. that will assist in pointing radios in the ‘best’ direction. As more 5G radios come online, and Helium Mappers (like myself) provide real coverage data, these new consoles will reflect validated coverage data.

This barebones Modeled Coverage Map shows radio performance based on the Modeled Coverage Data. The first version shows how many hexes the Radio covers, at which signal levels, and what are other competing Radios in that hex. With the passing of this HIP, more features will be added to evolve this map into a full-scale Coverage Explorer.

Summary

HIP-74 lays the groundwork to start rewarding Helium Mobile Hotspot operators based on actual coverage provided vs. mere existence. Specifically:

• It proposes a framework to count coverage using res 12 hexes;
• It proposes a framework for incorporating external data sources (aka Oracles) to calculate and/or coverage;
• It proposes Obstruction Data Oracle as the first such external data source.

We expect this to be the first in a series of HIPs that will incorporate other data sources, such as zoning and population density, feedback from carrier members of the MOBILE DAO, network users and mappers, etc. Our aim is to make future HIPs smaller and more easily consumable.

This HIP affects only the Helium 5G network and has no impact on IoT rewards.

Once implemented, Modeled Coverage will be a significant milestone in introducing the Proof-of-Coverage concept in the Mobile Network. The blog post MOBILE Proof-of-Coverage: The Road Ahead provides a detailed MOBILE PoC Roadmap. Combined with other parameters like uptime and backhaul, Obstruction Data allows for more fair rewards and incentivizes high-quality deployments of Radios.

Back To The Front

MOBILE Rewards were to end in January

I have just received MOBILE rewards totaling 9,232.01 for February 1, 2023. I am not that surprised. I haven’t heard anything new about the funding whatsoever.

Current $MOBILE Token Stack: 2,181,733.83

There’s no end in sight for Helium MOBILE Rewards! Cellular Summer into April…

Current $MOBILE Stack: 2,568,486.68 [3/15/23]

A very powerful tool, used to analyze the contents of memory (RAM) from suspect computers. The examiner will take a ‘snapshot’ or ‘image’ of the contents of the target PC’s RAM memory while the machine is still running. Once the image file of the RAM contents has been secured, the Volatility tool analyzes the contents and renders the data into a readable form.

This tool is vital to a thorough examination, as it shows investigators what was taking place on the target PC at the time of capture. We can view what programs were running, what network connections were open (and closed) and many other bits of evidence that can be used to prove a case in a court of law.

Knowing which websites were connected at any given time, along with what programs were running, can lead investigators to resolution of computer virus damage, Malware attacks, and acquisition of other pertinent evidence. Info gleaned from memory can point to other possibly compromised network assets etc.

I have been using Volatility for quite some time now as it is a component or ‘module’ in the Autopsy Software Suite. There are some updates I need to study up on, hence this post.

Return To The Front

Getting Back into Recording Music! I’m Building a Small Project Recording Studio in the Guest Room!

but first! meet my new love!

This example from 1976 is in near mint condition! Front and back!

No need to squint! Serial #700xxx

It was “Love at First Sight!” …yes, I have the pickup cover!

More info to follow on the recording setup. It looks like I’ve decided on Presonus Studio One v6 Pro software. Still undecided on the interface.

Back To The Front