elcome back! In this post, I'm gonna be talking about the MNTD Helium Miner by RakWireless. If it's worth buying it, how to set it up, and most importantly, how you can participate in their upcoming drops and things you need to know for mining Helium (HNT) in general.
If you're here for the first time on this blog, we talk about all tech-related tutorials, gear reviews, and crypto content, and much more I'm planning down the road. If this is something that interests you, consider subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter.
- 🛒 Check out MNTD Helium Miners: https://link.tariosultan.com/mntd
(*Use this coupon to get an extra 10% OFF: TARIO)
MNTD Miner Drop
On the recent MNTD Helium Miner drop, I was fortunate enough to reserve order of two miners. One of them is Gold Spot Limited Edition Miner and followed by a Black Spot version of the same hotspot Miner.
The drop and order date was placed on December 15 and I got my miners on exactly December 31. The duration is 16 days, just a little over two weeks.
This is apparently the fastest way to get a helium miner at this current moment of time without placing an order regularly, waiting for 16 to 20 weeks, or getting onto the secondhand market that currently supports EU countries, the US and Canada.
MNTD Miner Unboxing
I'm pretty impressed with their packaging. It's definitely double the quality of the Bobcat 300.
If you haven't watched that particular video, click here to watch it.
I believe this is the same package as the regular RakWireless miners, just different colors and with the MNTD logo.
When you open the box, the first thing you're going to see is this instruction guide. It includes all the product specs and the steps that are needed to set up the miner on the Helium network. And the last page of this instruction guide is Secure Your Account Seed Phrase. If you're first time setting up a helium Miner, you might want to download a Helium Wallet app.
When you set up your account, it will provide you with a 12-word seed phrase. And make sure you write these down on a piece of paper or store it somewhere secure. Make sure you don't share and give it out to people because this is the only thing that is required to log into your helium wallet.
The package mainly comes in three parts and the first one is the antenna on top. This is a 2.8 dBi antenna.
By the way, if you want better mining rewards, consider upgrading to a 5.8 dBi antenna or up to an 8.0 dBi antenna. Obviously, it depends on your location, whether you're in an urban area or far away from the city (suburb). And the second item is the miner itself and followed by a USB-C charger on the bottom left.
Goldspot vs Blackspot
Now let's talk about these two miners. The gold one is called MNTD Limited Edition Goldspot Miner and the black one is a standard edition. It's called a Blackspot miner.
The main difference in the hardware is the gold one comes with 8GB of Ram. And the standard version, the black version, comes with 4GB of Ram.
And on top of that, the Goldspot comes with VIP support. And that's the difference between the Goldspot and Blackspot.
Now comes along with the next question: Is 4GB Ram good enough or do you want to upgrade to 8GB Ram?
In the past, I've had one Bobcat 300 Miner that kept syncing and on syncing back and forth and never really had any earnings.
Based on my research and understanding, this is all due to the ram size and that could be one of the older versions of the Bobcat.
So the conclusion here is as long as your miner is above 4GB Ram, you should be good to go. For any items you pick at MNTD, you're guaranteed the 4GB Ram minimum.
How to Setup MNTD Miner
Now let's talk about how you set up these Minted Miners. First and foremost, attach the antenna to this miner through the RP-SMA male connector, then plugin with a USB-C power cable.
The first time connecting the miner to the power cable, you will see the red indicator light. That's all you need to do in terms of hardware and the rest of the steps are done on the Helium app. Now let's open your Helium app.
If this is your first time setting up, simply go to App Store or Google Play. It depends on what device you use. I have a detailed Helium wallet setup video on a Bobcat miner 300. Make sure you watch that video first as a new miner set up because I went through how to set up your helium wallet correctly.
Helium Wallet App
Once you open your Helium app, go to the top right corner and click on the plus icon (+).
Now you just need to choose the right miner brand. You can scroll down and locate the Rack Hotspot or type in the search bar. Select the Rak Hotspot option. You're going to see 4 different tips to choose the right location for your miner. You may want to give them a read.
Once you're done with that, swipe to the last card and click on "I've read the guide" and then click on "I understand" since in the previous step we have already powered the unit through the USB-C. Simply click on the green button that says "I'm powered up".
Then the next step, make sure your phone's Bluetooth is enabled and click on "Scan for my Hotspot". Give it a few seconds as the Helium app is scanning your local network to find Rak Hotspot through Bluetooth.
Wifi vs Ethernet
Once you see the device showed up as a Helium Hotspot, give it a click and patiently waited out. The next phase is to set up the Internet connection with this miner. If you want to go with the WiFi, simply choose your home WiFi SSID. If you want to use the Ethernet you're going to see at the bottom it says Use Ethernet instead and you want to go with that option. In my case, I'm using WiFi for my internet connection and the next step is to enter your WiFi password.
Once you're done with that, click on Connect. Once it's connected, the last step is to set up the hotspot location and antenna. You want to tap on the blue button for allowing the Helium app to find your location. You will see two different pings appear, the white one and the blue one. If the blue ping location is a little bit off, what you can do is manually drag the white ping and set up the location manually and accurately.
Assert Location
By the way, the cost of setting the location is $10.
Since it's a brand new miner, it's completely covered. But in the future, if you want to reassert the miner location, you want to pay the $10 with the HNT tokens. The next step is choosing the antenna because I'm using a custom 5.8 dBi antenna by RakWireless, so I picked the custom antenna option. In your case, if you want to go with a default stock antenna, which is a 2.8 dBi antenna.
In terms of the height in meters, this doesn't have to be super accurate, but make sure your antenna is accurate.
Since this location is slightly above the ground, I put 5 meters here. In your case, it depends on your situation. You could be living in a single home or living in an apartment, so just Google an estimated height per floor and you want to enter your number accordingly.
Once you're done, you will be able to come to the confirmation page to confirm your location and your antenna. Once you're happy with everything, click on the green Register Hotspot button.
Sometimes you might see some error messages that pop up and what you want to do is actually close on it and you want to re-add the Helium Miner. Just like how we did the entire process again.
In my case, I did this twice. The first time I had an error message, I closed the error message and did it again and everything went through. And now I'm on the last registering Hotspot page you're going to see it keeps spinning.
When you see this, you see a button that says Go to Wallet. You just want to click on Go to Wallet and close this window. Everything is processing in the back end as we just submitted a new Helium Miner to the Helium network and waiting for the blockchain to update itself.
Relayed Status (Port Forwarding)
Once you have finished all these steps, you should be able to see a random name that's assigned to your Helium miner, and once you're done with that, there is a one really important step you need to do, which is to do the Port forwarding on your WiFi router as well as reserve a static IP for this helium miner. Otherwise, once your miner is fully synced, you'll see the status will turn to RELAYED and that might affect your rewards earning.
I have a detailed step-by-step tutorial that helped thousands of people do Port forwarding correctly on the router, and make sure you give that a watch. Hopefully, that will give you a hint in terms of removing the relayed status.
Miner Syncing
All right, here are my final thoughts and tips on minted helium miners. A few things I noticed when I set up these two miners. Number one, because of the 4GB and 8GB Ram, the syncing process is pretty fast. Both miners had finished syncing process within two days.
Personally, I think Helium is still a long-term project.
30 Days HNT Earnings
We have a mined of around 50% of all the HNT tokens. It's not going to get you rich or give you a whole bunch of rewards within the first month or two, like how it used to be. This leads to my next point is the reward earning. I've set these two miners for about a month or so. So far, my HNT earning on average is about 0.1 to 0.2 HNT per day.
Again, this is totally depending on the location of the miner, the elevation, and how many witnesses are you witnessing. And last but not least is going to be the reward scale. If your reward scale is 0.3, obviously you're not going to earn much as someone who has 0.7 reward scale.
So far, we are approaching around 600,000 miners around the globe. That's why some of these miners are super crowded in urban areas. Some hexagons on the map can have up to 30, 40, or 50 miners inside of one hexagon.
That's why if you want to buy these miners and hope you can get rich, probably it's not a good idea. But if you are really interested in passive income in the crypto industry and Helium network is still one of my top recommendations.
Lastly, I do want to mention that if you want to have a better reward, consider an antenna upgrade. One of my miners is on an 8dBi antenna. The other one right now is on a 5.8 dBi antenna. So I've upgraded both. They are having better reward than the stock antenna, which is a 2.8 dBi antenna.
- 🛒 Check out MNTD Helium Miners: https://link.tariosultan.com/mntd
(*Use this coupon to get an extra 10% OFF: TARIO)
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you guys enjoy this post as much as I enjoy delivering it to you, and thank you for every one of you supporting my YouTube channel. This really means a lot to me and this is really motivating me and encouraging me to make more valuable content for you guys.
This is Tario Sultan signing out I'll see you guys in the next one.
Much love!
More from
Crypto
category
.png)
