Helium mining is back with 5G
Making your Helium miner back in less than a 1 month feels like a distant memory. Although I was confident these market conditions would never return … It seems like I’m being proven wrong once again. Helium miners are once again making thousands of dollars per month, on a single well placed device.

IoT vs 5G

This time however, I’m not talking about the good old IoT miners. Nope, Helium 5G mining is all the rage now.
How is this possible? A little over 3 months ago, HNT was worth less than $2 and now we are back at $10. But not only HNT went up. Both $MOBILE and $IOT tokens had nice gains. The $MOBILE-token however, made the most impressive moves. Why? Because Helium is both riding the DePin narrative and delivering a competitive $20 all-in mobile plan and guess what: people are speculating once more on what that will mean for the future.
Source: Coingecko.com
Why do I say speculating? Because if you look at the Helium Explorer, we see that on average the Helium network is bringing in $2,500 a day, aka 1M dollars per year. However, we don’t see exponential growth in revenue in the past weeks. That’s why it is safe to assume people think/hope revenue will follow and that it will translate into utility value for the token that they just bought.
Source: Helium Explorer
Important note: people are already valuing Helium at 2B $. That’s 2000x the current projected revenue. I say: bubble.
But enough about that … we care about how much money we can make before this bubble bursts.

Getting started

Setting up a Helium IoT device was easy peasy, and it still is. If you are interested in that, be sure to check out my previous videos. You can find IoT miners for cheap and they still give you a nice annual return. Just don’t expect to make your money back within a month.
Freedom Fi Helium 5G gateway + Baicells radio
The opportunity this time is the 5G miners, surfing on the hype created by the Mobile plan. Sadly they are only available in the US. Luckily companies like Helium Deploy allow people from around the world to co-invest in 5G miners or you can use the host matching services offered by HotspotRF to find a home for the miner you are about to buy.
Helium Mobile 20$ Unlimited
Now, whether you are from the US or Europe. It’s worth going through this article, because you want to know exactly what the potential of a miner is in a certain location before investing. And that doesn’t change whether you setup the miner yourself or if it’s being done by an external service.
Another important note: last year it became clear that you shouldn’t invest your money into an indoor 5G miner and that you should focus on outdoor miners.
Getting back to the outdoor 5G miners, they are much bigger than the small IoT miners that we were used to. They are also more challenging to set up as they consist of 2 devices: a gateway and a radio. Additionally you’ll have to register your setup with the government and get approval before you can use it. This requires a bunch of information, documenting both the hardware and the exact placement of the radio.
The last big difference is price: you can buy a Helium IoT miner for 200$, while your minimum investment for Helium 5G setup is 2000$ and the most popular setup based on profitability it the FreedomFi Helium 5G Miner and Baicells NOVA 430H Bundle.

How much can you make

Although a 2K investment is steep, it is possible to make back your investment within the first month with a well placed miner. An example of this is this miner in Miami, which is making a whopping 300$ per day:
Link to this miner
You are probably asking yourself: how is this possible if the Helium network is only bringing in $2,500 per day? The reason for this is that Helium, just as before, is rewarding coverage. Mobile users will not join the network unless there is coverage. So to incentivize people to build out the network infrastructure across the US, they are giving rewards in order to solve this chicken or the egg problem.
It’s also important to know that this specific example is enjoying the benefits of a bug in the system: he is getting a lot of coverage points across the ocean. Which is pointless. The latest HIP103 proposal will solve this issue and make sure that rewards go to places where coverage is needed. If you want to learn more about this proposal, you’ll find a link in the description of this video.
HIP103 proposal
Coverage points is one thing, where is the money itself coming from? The money is coming from the token value. Miners get the tokens and investors are buying the tokens from miners. So as long as investors are willing to pay for the future potential of the network, the price of the $MOBILE token will remain high. As soon as investors want to pay for the current value, generated by the network, the returns will of course tank. This is why I believe this is a short term opportunity. But an opportunity nonetheless as we are at the start of the bullrun and DePin is a hot narrative in this cycle.
A second factor is the amount of Helium 5G miners in the network. The amount of Helium tokens being paid out to miners for coverage is fixed. E.g. if Helium is paying out 1000 $MOBILE tokens per days for coverage and we have 10 miners online -> each miner will receive 100 $MOBILE tokens on average. However if tomorrow we have 1000 miners online, each miner will on average only receive 1 $MOBILE per block. Of course, the bigger the network gets, the more valuable it is and the higher the price of the token should be. Unless … the investors already calculated the future value of the network.
If you want a quick calculation of how much you could earn, you can use the 5G Miner Profitability and ROI calculator made by HotspotRF: https://hotspotrf.com/helium-5g/
The most important factors are the amount of $MOBILE you mine per day, which is something I’ll explain how to calculate in a few seconds, and the price of the $MOBILE token.
The calculator also allows you to input the growth of the network, which is needed. Because more and more people will realise mining $MOBILE is very profitable and that means more miners will fight for the same rewards. This will continue until people no longer find it worth the investment.

How to calculate your rewards

In order to calculate rewards for your specific location, I suggest you use https://planner.hellohelium.com/planner . This tool is made by Helium and is completely free

1. Once you arrive on the page, click on “planner” and click on “login”. Make a new account and confirm your email.
2. Once logged in, click on the “Planner” tab and then “Create New Plan”
3. Fill in location information

Helium Mobile Planner
Don’t feel too overwhelmed as it’s less complex than it might seem.

1. Start with a name for the location, this is whatever makes sense to you
2. Address will be auto completed while you type, be as accurate as possible
3. Latitude & Longitude will be calculated for you based on the address
4. Antenna**: if you haven’t decided on what to buy, just use the golden standard: Baicells Nova 430H . They currently give you the best bang for your buck. If you are interested in that setup, you’ll find a link in the description of this video.
5. The height will be important as usually the higher the location, the better the coverage
6. Elevation is the angle you have your radio face. By default it’s best to keep it at 0. However if you want to aim your radio down, fill in a negative value eg -20° and if you want to aim it up, use a positive value +20°

Source: HotspotRF
7. The last value is called Azimuth, which simply means which direction your radio is facing.
Source HotspotRF
In our example, we want to hit the purple hexagons, which are “boosted areas” that give extra rewards. To do this I’ll use 240, which makes my radio look south west and is far from perfect.
* Important note: the simulator only takes into account 1 antenna. To increase coverage, you can add up 5 radios to 1 gateway. Sadly you can simulate that, but you can simulate each antenna setup 1 by 1 and add it all together.
Once you have all your values in the setup, you hit “submit coverage plan”. Because this service is free and it involves a lot of calculations, the simulation may take up to 1h. So don’t panic if you don’t get instant results.
Helium Mobile Planner
Once you have your “estimated coverage points”, you can use this value in the Helium 5G Rewards calculator for a more accurate calculation. In our example, we are earning $27 per day at current prices and you can see my setup is far from perfect. Yet, it gives us a ROI in just a little over 2.5 months:
HotspotRF ROI calculator
However, simply by changing the direction of my radio from 240° to 180°, I have increased my rewards over 50% bringing my time to break even down to less than 2 months.

Is it worth the investment

This brings us to the last question: is it all worth it? As you have seen in these simple examples: location & setup are everything. It’s therefore better to share your profits with someone who can give you a top location over keeping 100% of the profits on a shitty location.
Other than that: $2,000 is a serious investment for most people out there and not every location will give you a ROI within 2 months. This means you are exposed to a very volatile market for longer, which increases your risk.
Your returns depend on how much people believe in the future of the Helium $MOBILE token, which is driven both by news that Helium puts out and the hype in the crypto market. If people get bored of the “decentralized infrastructure”-hype or the entire market crashes again, so will your returns.
Lastly: even if the value of $MOBILE keeps going up, you have to realize more people will be motivated to set up a miner and the more miners you have, the more you’ll be sharing your rewards with other people. This means that it’s not only important to get your hands on a miner fast, but you also need to be able deploy your miner instantly. And don’t forget: you need the government to approve your installation, which takes time.