Speed Up Helium Miner Hotspot Sync / Fixing “Relayed” Status

Bobcat Miner
Bobcat 300 Helium Miner*

I recently received my Bobcat 300 miner* after months of waiting. Much of the advice I’d read/seen on the subject suggested to leave the hotspot alone and that it takes a very long time to sync.

This is true but it assumes you configured your network correctly first and have the correct port opened to the outside world. If it’s not it will take even longer to sync the blockchain and your hotspot will have a yellow “Relayed” status. This is slowing down your sync and will harm your rewards even when it finishes since your responses to challenges will be “relayed” and will often time out before they are relayed through other hotspots.

In this guide I’ll show you how to get your network configured correctly for your hotspot to sync as fast as possible and remove the “Relayed” status!

Overview

The Helium hotspot uses peer to peer networking similar to other cryptocurrency wallets (with “nodes” etc.) as well as BitTorrent and other peer to peer applications. Xbox Live and PSN also both use peer to peer networking where one console with a high quality internet connection will be chosen to be the “host” and the other players in the game lobby create a peer to peer connection to the host console.

Just like every other peer to peer application not having the correct ports open on your firewall impacts your speed. On our Xbox Live/PSN example you would get a “poor” connection rating and never be chosen as a host. With Helium the “Relayed” status is the equivalent of the Xbox Live/PSN “Poor” connection quality rating. The ports are not publicly accessible over the internet and you get penalized / a downgraded experience for this.

Here’s an example of a relayed hotspot:

Relayed Helium Hotspot
Relayed Helium Hotspot

The solution is to open the correct port on your firewall by creating a “port forwarding” entry in your router.

Port Forwarding

The specific instructions for your router will vary but can be found with a quick Google search. It’s likely you’ve encountered this before for something else but if you haven’t it isn’t too difficult.

Once you feel confident you have the knowledge/instructions you need ready to set up port forwarding the main critical port you need to forward on your router is TCP Port:

44158

This is the port that will eliminate the “relayed” status and allow inbound connections to your device. This will also speed up your sync as outbound only points are at a disadvantage here since sometimes the people who connect to you end up sending you blocks!

Once you’ve set up the port forwarding it should update the status on it’s own eventually or if you want to speed things up you can unplug the power cable from the hotspot for about 10 seconds and then plug it back in. With all the hotspots joining it may take 15-30+ minutes (depending on many factors) but it should show up as solid green with no “relayed” status:

Happy Status Helium Hotspot
Happy Status Helium Hotspot

Observe that even though I am not 100% sync’d I still am green status with 91.31% sync’d. This can get very sluggish to update sometimes but unless you’re seeing no activity whatsoever for at least a few hours I would urge leaving it alone for the most part.

Note on Offline Status

It’s not unusual for the hotspots to go offline when trying to sync with the blockchain. They should however still be connecting periodically and you should see your sync slowly making progress.

My hotspot has got stuck several times where it went off for the entire night and when I turned it back on it had made no progress.

My best rule of thumb is to leave it alone as long as the light is “green” (for the Bobcat miner*) unless you aren’t seeing any change or progress for a long period of time. This may vary based on your miner but the problems actually seem to be with the Helium network as a whole. Which miner you have can have an impact but most of the congestion is on the Helium network itself from so many new hotspots joining and syncing at once!

Conclusion

I’m still not fully synchronized yet with the blockchain but it’s staying green and doesn’t have the relay status. So many points are joining the network that the hardware is having a difficult time keeping up!

Remember, the relay status does penalize your mining rewards. It also prevents you from participating in several other features in the Helium blockchain so make sure you have a green non-relayed status.

It’s definitely frustrating how slow it can be but as long as you periodically monitor that the percentage is going up (wait a few hours minimum before power cycling) and have your ports opened you will sync as fast as anyone else is (slowly) but you won’t be at a disadvantage!

If you have a Bobcat 300 they have just released a utility called the “Diagnoser”. Full guide here: Bobcat 300 Diagnoser Tool / Utility Guide

Update 6/23/2021

I woke up this morning to find the hotspot 99.79% sync’d. It was offline and after a quick unplug and plug back in I’m syncing again and at 99.81%. This is the way folks, open that port and get out of relayed!

Update 6/24/2021

Success! My hotspot has completely sync’d. I’ve issued and completed a challenge now and am just waiting to witness my first hotspot and even earned 0.05 HNT for some reason (maybe my issued or successfully completed challenge?):

Helium Hotspot Fully Sync'd
Helium Hotspot Fully Sync’d
Hotspot First Earnings
Hotspot First Earnings

All in all it took about 5.5-6 days. This is because of so many new hotspots coming online so if you’re in a similar time range don’t panic unless you’re still at a really low % sync’d. Don’t give up, mine took forever but it’s finally working.

Update 6/29/2021

I’ve investigated the effects of relayed vs. non relayed status. If you observe the connections with an enterprise firewall you can see how many connections it has at a time. When you are in relayed status you will only have about 4 connections. When your ports are opened you’ll have closer to 20-100 connections! All of these connections are transferring data so it definitely helps speed things up.

The point has been running for a few days now and has already earned about 15 HNT! Hang in there, it’s worth it!

Update 8/7/2021

If your miner and radio aren’t the same unit (not the case with newer miners) you should also port forward UDP port:

1680

I discovered that this was a listening public port when writing my guide on the new Bobcat 300 “Diagnoser” tool. I then was able to confirm this on the official Helium GitHub page.

The document says that if your miner and radio are the same unit then port forwarding this from the internet is not important so the Bobcat 300 (and all other Helium miners that have a name) do not need this but I wanted to add it here for completeness.

In other words, your Bobcat 300 (and the other newer “approved” models) and your radio are already the same device so they don’t need any ports opened or forwarded to talk to each other even though you can see it listening on the diagnostics. On older miners (back when you were able to make your own homebrew frankenminers and join the network without a special enrollment key) this wasn’t necessarily the case and then you would need to forward this port.

A port forward should not be necessary for most people unless you know your radio is separate from your miner (it probably isn’t, and you can’t make these types of miners anymore).

If you didn’t build your hotspot yourself, from parts, by hand, you do not have this. An external antenna does not apply, That is NOT a radio unit. It’s just an antenna and it can’t do anything by itself without a radio unit controlling it.

A “radio unit” is the computer/device that the end of your antenna plugs into. It has to have a CPU to process signals from / send signals to the antenna. If your antenna plugs directly into your miner then your miner *IS* the radio unit for sure and this is almost certainly the case for you.

It’s no longer possible to do this (only approved manufacturer hotspots can join the Helium network now, but you used to be able to homebrew) and hasn’t been for a long time because people used to make tons of hacked/spoofed hotspots (still a problem to this day but it used to be much, much worse).

Was your hotspot manufactured by a company like Bobcat, RAK, Synchrobit, any of them? Then you didn’t build a homebrew hotspot from parts by hand so you don’t have one and this does not apply to you. There has never been one sold like this that has a name or brand. If you can tell me what your hotspot “is” and that actually means something you don’t have it!

Hopefully this clears up some confusion for anyone else who is investigating this. The new Bobcat 300 diagnostic tool will undoubtedly make many other people wonder about this as well. The answer is that yes the Bobcat is listening on that port, but it’s talking to another chip that is also literally a part of the Bobcat. It’s like a computer talking to localhost or 127.0.0.1.

It doesn’t matter what your internet connection’s firewall is doing in this situation. It’s only a “localhost” connection in a modern Helium miner’s case because it doesn’t need to make any external connections like old school homebrew setups may have had to at some point.

You for sure do not have to worry about this now with any hotspot that has a “brand” or “name” and you didn’t build yourself!

Other Resources

For the best place to mine and exchange your altcoins such as Helium (HNT) to Bitcoin (BTC) check out my Best Altcoin Mining Pools and Exchanges article

If you have a Bobcat check out my Bobcat 300 Diagnoser Tool guide to learn how to use this tool

If you have a Nebra hotspot check out my getting root and SSH access to the Nebra guide

241 thoughts on “Speed Up Helium Miner Hotspot Sync / Fixing “Relayed” Status”

  1. Avatar for Craig

    James, please help!

    I’ve got a miner, all ports are open (UPnP did it automatically)(I also created a static IP address and added to it to DMZ)

    I’ve been connected for 4 days now and still syncing. When running diagnostic it says I’m 100% connected and my height and the blockchain height are pretty equal.

    Everything on my diagnostic is green so not sure why still on syncing?

    Thanks

    1. Avatar for James A. Chambers

      Hey Craig,

      Welcome! How long have you waited here? Your setup actually sounds perfect. I take it you have checked the port status with one of the external port checking websites and that all looks okay as well.

      My guess is that there’s nothing wrong here and that you’re just waiting for the Helium network to update your status. This seems to take a very long time (anywhere from 8-16 hours to several days in rare cases). Before you do anything else I would just wait a day or two. It’s hard to wait but if you look through the examples here you will see a bunch of people that sometimes waited several days before the status changed.

      This is because your Helium hotspot’s status is “gossiped” across the network which is a very slow process. This is essentially a visual glitch. If your ports are opened the effects are actually immediate even if your status takes several days to update potentially. As long as the external port checking tools are showing your port 44158 as open I think it’s only a matter of time before it updates (based on past experience).

      Hopefully that helps!

      1. Avatar for Craig

        Thanks James. Since they released the latest firmware I’ve went to 99.55% synced and I’m just following what you mention above.

        I’m on day 6 now so feel it should be getting close.

        Also I checked my port on hotspotty and it came back confirming it was open.

        Hopefully only time will tel but I’m nearly there!

        1. Avatar for James A. Chambers

          Hey Craig,

          Thanks for following up! That is sounding so much better than the last time we talked. Mine was really struggling for a few days too. I even saw it go yellow/red for a little bit yesterday evening but today it’s green and happy again.

          It definitely should not take this long normally but there have been known issues going on for sure and so I think you got caught up in those extending the time you were dealing with this issue. Definitely let us know when it changes over if you wouldn’t mind!

  2. Avatar for ashley

    hi James

    I just got a miner but it relayed 🙁 I do
    have inbound and outbound but the status is relayed
    my public IP is closed but my private IP is open what does it mean and what do I have to do?
    ports_desc": "only need to port forward 44158. For 22, only when need remote support. public port open/close isn't accurate here, if your listen_addr is IP address, it should be OK", "ports": { "192.145:22": "open", "192.145:44158": "open", "49.184.X.X:22": "closed/timeout", "49.184.X.X:44158": "closed/timeout"
    This is my miner status

    any help thank you

    1. Avatar for James A. Chambers

      Hey Ashley,

      It looks like you need a port forward entry in your main internet gateway. This is usually the device from your ISP. If you go in there you will put an entry for port 44158 forwarding to your miner’s IP address.

      Usually this is a cable/DSL/fiber modem. That is the device you will want to put this in and it should take that public IP status to “open” as well. Hopefully that helps!

  3. Avatar for Jos

    Hi James,

    First of all, thanks for helping people out with their issues. Like most of them, I am also experiencing an issue.

    After running smoothly for a while my SenseCap is not witnessing or mining for a few days. Everything seems to be okay, green light, fully synced, port 44158 open, no relayed status, etcetera, but no activity for a couple of days.
    I have rebooted the device without succes, still no activity.

    Do you know how I can resolve this issue?

    1. Avatar for James A. Chambers

      Hey Jos,

      This is a tricky one for sure. Usually when things like this come out of the blue it’s due to firmware updates in the background. These typically happen automatically in the background. What tends to happen is that the issue was probably introduced in a firmware update and will likely be fixed in a few weeks. In those situations it’s usually best to wait as everything people try usually causes more harm than good and they end up breaking things that were previously working, etc.

      There is another possibility though. On many miners it’s pretty common for the storage to get corrupted. On Bobcat it is extremely easy to wipe the storage and it will resync completely from scratch within a few hours. I know many other miners have this factory reset / wipe option.

      If SenseCAP does have a wipe / factory reset option then this is usually the preferred fix for corrupted storage. It also doesn’t take very long. We have had some people in the past though that had miners that didn’t have this option nor could I find a way to do it.

      It looks like SenseCAP miners do have this option to me according to their documentation here: https://docs.sensecapmx.com/home/local-console/m1-local-console-guide/how-to-reset-blocks. I’m not sure if you have this exact model but if they are offering this feature then I’m sure it will be on there one way or another. This is definitely an option for you as well.

      Best of luck and let us know how it turns out!

      1. Avatar for Jos

        Hi James,

        As you proposed, I have reset the blocks and performed a “turbo sync”. After having the blocks fully synced again, still no activity occurred. Meanwhile, the Helium network had been ‘renewed’ turning full hotspots into light hotspots. Unfortunately, this renewal didn’t make things better, still no activity as many other hotspots in the world.

        I suppose waiting is the only option…

        Anyway, thanks for your advice.

  4. Avatar for Richard embling
    Richard embling

    Hi james was wondering if you could help with my relayed problem, virgin media wifi, have opened ports says incoming and outgoing is ok I’ve been set up 2/3 days now started earning within hour of connecting bobcat to helium app so that was good just got a relayed problem I cant seem to fix any help with this would be much appreciated.

    1. Avatar for James A. Chambers

      Hey Richard,

      Welcome! Have you tried setting up a port forwarding entry in your Virgin Media router? That’s the first step. It’s possible you may have to contact them to get on a plan that supports this type of port forwarding and we have some recent examples in the comments of people who tried to do that.

      It takes some time when you set up the port forwarding entry (up to a day or two) for it to update and go to full green status. Have you done any of the port checking tools yet? I’m sure we can get it going!

  5. Avatar for Chris

    Hi James, I am trying to do port forwarding. The IP on my Bobcat is showing as a 10.10 address but when i log into my router to set up a static or do port forwarding the router will only accept ip’s starting 192.168 do you have a solution on how i can either convert or change to 10.10 address of my bobcat? Thanks

    1. Avatar for James A. Chambers

      Hey Chris,

      Basically one of the devices needs to be in “bridge mode” so they are all on the same network. Port forwarding won’t work from a 10.10 to 192.168 or vice versa basically.

      Usually this happens if you have something like a cable modem and then have a separate wireless router you’ve bought. In that situation things that are plugged in directly to the modem will end up with 192.168 IPs for example but they need to be on the same network.

      Most routers can be put into some kind of bridge mode. We’ve covered that a lot here as well too if you want to use the comment search box above here you’ll find a ton of different people who managed this for sure. Hopefully that helps!

  6. Avatar for Sam

    Hello! I feel as though I’ve tried everything to get my bobcat out of relay. I have 10 bobcats, all are fine and not relayed except for one: and it is the only one that has a Spectrum Router. Is there a specific trick to get this router out of relay? any suggestions would be appreciated!

    1. Avatar for James A. Chambers

      Hey Sam,

      I checked through some Spectrum router instructions here and it does sound a little less intuitive than some routers. I would check against that guide first and see if you did everything the same.

      If you did then what does your Bobcat’s status report look like? Are you getting a certain NAT type or what does that report show? To be clear that’s the one you get if you type the Bobcat’s IP in the browser and run the reports from there. It should give us some clues about what we might need to configure on the Spectrum here. Hopefully that helps!

        1. Avatar for James A. Chambers

          Hey Dan,

          Symmetric NAT will definitely give you relayed status. It needs to be “open” or “none” essentially like this:

          "p2p_status": [
          "+---------+-------+",
          "| name |result |",
          "+---------+-------+",
          "|connected| yes |",
          "|dialable | yes |",
          "|nat_type | none |",
          "| height |1325075|",
          "+---------+-------+",
          "",
          ""

          Are you trying to forward through multiple routers by chance? You may need to contact your ISP as well (especially if this is like 4G/5G as those almost always have some kind of block like this on it). They’ll usually allow you to do full port forwarding from a small additional fee (you can search the comments here for some examples if you search port forwarding in the box above the comments here).

          Hopefully that helps!

          1. Avatar for Dan

            Thank you James for the quick response! I’m not trying to forward through multiple routers. I will definitely reach out to the ISP to see if they provide a full port forward for a fee as you suggested. I’ve logged into the router admin privileges and tried port forwarding as you and all the YouTube videos suggested to 44158 but didn’t have much luck. By enabling UPnP do you think that would make any difference? If you provide additional consulting (so I can pay you) please let me know. Thanks again for helping all us nubes!

            1. Avatar for James A. Chambers

              Hey Dan,

              No problem at all! So I don’t think UPnP will make any difference as Helium would have to be programmed to take advantage of it but it kind of just expects everything to be set up already (it would really help if it did this, or let people choose alternative ports than 44158 to have more than one miner on a single IP but this still is not possible).

              To see an example of someone who fixed it this way check out this thread.

              This is exceptionally common with 5G / wireless / that type of technology (as well as shared internet situations ran by large apartment complexes or companies) and you almost always have to contact those types of providers to get a fully open port. They should know exactly what you are looking for when you contact them as everyone going through this so far had some option they could add on to their plan (usually pretty cheap) that the provider already had ready to pitch to them.

              If you feel like you’re having a hard time explaining it to your ISP (or they have no clue what you’re talking about) one tip is that the most common reason people get this is for Xbox Live / PSN so they don’t have a “Poor” or “degraded” connection status. The other person I linked above had an ISP that mostly offered this feature toward gamers but it is basically the exact same thing for the exact same reason. The Xbox / PSN can use UPnP but some networks don’t allow this at all either and that is when people need this. There’s a lot of overlap between ISPs that already restrict ports like this and block UPnP altogether so it’s not too uncommon to get this double whammy and that is exactly how the thread I linked above’s ISP was.

              Basically these services require a truly open port to not have one of these degraded statuses (called relayed in Helium, but it’s a similar “degraded” status to poor/degraded in Xbox Live/PSN). This can be a useful way to explain it and help the person you’re working with get you to the right plan as this is the most likely reason people call to request this (other than business, but if they think you’re a business they’ll try to sell you business features which means $$$). They’ll probably have never heard of Helium but if you ask for a plan that allows port fort forwarding more along these lines of being a gamer they’ll probably be more likely to get you to the right place.

              I think you’re on the right track and let me know if I can help further!

  7. Avatar for willian

    hola, tengo un hostpot linxdot que derepente se desconecto de la red y ahora no esta ni la ip en el router no puedo emparejarlo el bluetooth no funciona la luz del internet esta encendida la de lcoriente tambien pero el miner no funciona antes si como puedo solucionar esto gracias

    1. Avatar for James A. Chambers

      Hey Willian,

      According to the Linxdot documentation the Bluetooth model is only on for about 5 minutes and does not have a pairing button.

      I would try unplugging the power from the Linxdot and plugging it back in again and then immediately try pairing with it in that first 5 minutes. You may be able to find out a lot more / easily fix it if you can get it paired.

      No IP in the router suggests that the miner has indeed lost it’s network connection. Try pairing with it like I said by unplugging the power to turn on the Bluetooth for 5 minutes and then give it a try and see if you can get it to rejoin the network. Definitely let us know what you find!

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