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
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
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!
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’dHotspot 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:
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!
Hi James and also to everyone here. I hope you guys are having a great time wherever you might be.
James, would you be able to help me understand few things about my setup.?
I have two antenna and bobcat 300. 8 dbi and 4 dbi. My question is this. Would it be possible to have two antennas mounted to my miner? Has anyone done this?
The other question is this. Why is my miner doing the mining only few times a day and not every 20 to 30 minutes? I’m in London\UK and the city is really big. I should be getting rewarded every few minutes. The reason I took two antennas is to have this 4 dbi picking up those close to me and the 8 dbi to reach those outside London. The 8 dbi when in use can go sometime over 50 km away.
Hopefully I’m not taking too much of your time to help me.
Welcome! So London has come up a few times around here and what we’ve learned is that there seems to be so many hotspots there that there is dramatic capping going on on the points. This includes lowering the maximum transmit power and lower activity levels for sure. Helium basically is turning down transmit power and reducing activity in areas that are extremely busy. There’s a few in the US like in California as well that I’ve heard of so many points that people’s transmit scale is vastly reduced.
So basically to bring all this together about the two antennas I’m certain that it won’t let you do this as they’re already taking measures to reduce the transmit power of the one antenna you have that you are supposed to if that makes sense. They’re trying in your area to reduce traffic and congestion by basically having the points handicap themselves to lower transmit levels and it definitely wouldn’t use a second antenna even if it was capable of doing it for this reason. Your main one is probably scaled like Chris’ and some other people from London I’ve talked to unfortunately.
To put transmit power scaling of 25% in perspective if you have something like a 8 dBi antenna it would turn it into a 2 dBi antenna (roughly speaking, it’s not as simple as I’m describing it but in the end the rough numbers are close enough for our purposes). The Helium transmit scaling is basically turning that giant 8 dBi antenna into the same as a stock Bobcat antenna so this effect is dramatic. The 8 dBi antenna would still have the same disadvantages as a 8 dBi antenna always has such as a very long, flat signal so it would almost certainly be worse than the stock Bobcat antenna at 2 dBi which makes a full circle type of field instead of a very long flat one like a 8 dBi does.
It’s always tough to give advice to people in London facing this as it seems to be the location that causes such intense scaling/penalties and I’m not sure there’s really a good solution for this at the moment. Hopefully it helps explain what is happening a little at least!
Thank you so much for replying. So I wasted close to £90 for this 8 dbi in thinking it would work? A lot of people online keep saying you should have 6 dbi or 8 dbi so you can escape the city and reach the ones that are outside London. So helium mining inside cities like London is actually pointless.? When I have the 4 dbi antenna it mines just few times a day. Is that normal? Should the mining happen more often?
That’s a very, very good question and one that has been debated for quite some time. Here’s an example about London specifically. That reddit thread was basically arguing just that as a huge portion of the map is well within the “0 earnings” red range and that was 7 months ago.
For the antenna as to whether or not it’s a waste I think the answer is probably but it depends. Are you more near the outskirts? If you go on the Helium explorer and click around the map in your area is anyone earning anything significant? This is actually the best way to tell that I’ve found is to zoom around the hexes where your point is and examine the other points and see how they’re doing and what power level of antenna they are using (you can see this). Depending on your location it may be worthwhile.
If your antenna is within the return period that may be worth doing but it will depend on what turns up when you investigate the Helium explorer around your point and compare it with others to see what they’re doing.
The issue is that you will max out on your # of points you can hit with your beacon probably before the end of the street let alone the outskirts. They keep lowering the # of points you can ping until you “max” out but mine seem to be stopping at 14. There are probably substantially more than 14 points within range of your hotspot so it would never make it that far out before it hits the cap if that makes sense. It’s a lot easier to see this on the Helium explorer web site because they removed everything to do with beacons from the app.
It’s a really tough market and it’s hard to imagine a Helium antenna being worth getting in this environment to be perfectly honest no matter where it is. Mine has been earning something like 18-25 cents for a while now. When I first got it I would literally make $50-$60 a day (there were even a couple $100 days). Even a couple of months ago though it was at least a dollar and change per day though and now it’s completely evaporated into almost nothing. I actually have a Nebra point that I opened up just to see the Pi in it:
This is a sad admission but this is so much cooler to me than using it as a Helium point to make 20 cents a day. I’ve literally had it for months and just registered it today as I’ve been playing with it recently but I missed literally < $50-$80 worth of profits at the most with it letting it sit and if I let it sit now for the same time period I would miss out on far less than that. Having a nice outdoor contained Pi setup like that is really cool though and I may have more uses for that.
People are selling Nebra outdoors for $300 and less on eBay and that Pi inside it is probably half the value of it even though it's an old Compute Module 3 (the plain 3, not the 3+, and definitely last gen tech and not by today's standards, last gen already when they were made and priced at several hundred + dollars for a Pi they literally paid single digit dollars for). The Pis are really valuable right now due to the Pi shortage (which Helium manufacturers definitely played a real part in). I bet they paid no more than $50 for everything inside that box put together and the LoRa chips were probably the pricier parts.
This is what Helium has felt like since the start pretty much. You're basically always someone's greater fool watching them take the only real money that will be made in Helium and you have a vague understanding and constant little reminders of that the whole time and it just feels... bad. It felt the same for me starting as insane as $60 per day might sound right now I was the greater fool to everyone who was in earlier and had more insider information and I knew it / could see and feel it from day 1. People in really early got to participate in the validator pool occasionally which could be as much as $5000 in 24 hours.
All of my memories of the project are of them slowly taking very profitable things away. Another common thing you will hear is that every Helium update makes it worse and I legitimately think that’s true especially over the long term. The team could have taken this project in a completely different direction but they got paid and their partners got paid and are still trying to run the exact same scam/playbook with 5G and I’m just not playing this time even if my order was in early enough to “win”.
If we’re being totally honest (and I always am here) I would not recommend Helium mining right now to anyone and if you had a point preordered I would not spend one single penny on accessories on it and just try to recoup what you can and probably hold onto it until a bull market where you may be glad you have it again.
I cancelled all of my 5G preorders months ago because frankly the Helium team just keeps making mining worse and worse. First they got rid of regular points being validators, now we’re all becoming “Lite” points where essentially only 4% of rewards will go to the “old” LoRa network (subject to change and probably already has but that is what they are trying to do).
It’s not what I signed up for and not what they promised although some people reading this may disagree and be trying 5G (who knows, it may pay off but I’m very tired of crypto projects not living up to their promises or even really trying to and I really have no interest in anything but BTC at the moment).
People who get into 5G early enough will get paid (they’ll make sure of it, and in all the plans I’ve seen at our “light” points expense, and you’ll see the posts from people saying SEE IT PAID OFF but but it’s literally just part of the plan or nobody will get excited and buy too late) but that’s just the thing with crypto that I’m really sick of and want to see someone build something for the long term / really community and people oriented.
For Helium especially early on it definitely appeared to be true and that this was a network for the people by the people. I’m guessing historically when things really started to go south was when they banned people making their own homebrew points and made you have to buy it from an “approved” manufacturer. I knew that when I bought and looking back that is the red flag that I kick myself for ignoring now (I knew I could easily build one of these and I was going to but it was already too late). It was to fight spoofing but spoofing still remains a huge problem and closed-sourcing the hardware/platform directly led to this dirt cheap hardware marked up 10,000%+ with absurd delivery times.
Crypto really is just junk if we can’t achieve something longer term that benefits everyone participating and I’ve never had more doubts than I do right now due to the direction the entire industry is moving especially with mining and moving to proof of stake (only good with lots of $$ to start with) practically industry-wide. BTC is still the closest to anything that I would remotely refer to as “good” or “fair” and that is absolutely pathetic and frankly damning of every other crypto project that really should be justifying why it even exists right now.
That definitely includes Ethereum which is also a terrible, terrible project toward users/miners with absolutely hilariously atrocious fees and their DApp party trick is hardly unique or special at this point and other chains are doing that better too (for WAY cheaper).
Sorry for not having better news as I always try to give that when it’s possible but you are definitely onto something with your frustration here I’m afraid. Hopefully that helps!
Michael
2 years ago
Hi James,
I have a Bobcat300. I have changed my router recently, and have port forwarded 44158, set DMZ, and reserved the IP address for the miner.
I did this on my old router to get rid of ‘relayed’ status.
The Bobber app (Hotspots tab) says ‘relayed’ all the time. I dont quite understand if its right or wrong? As in the Bobber App diagnoser it doesnt say ‘relayed’.
I have read that with ‘Light Hotspots’ update which i assume i have got now, ‘relayed’ doesnt happen anymore. So unsure if im ‘relayed’ or not.
In the Bobber App, Hotspots Tab, Status, i can’t see ‘Gap’, or ‘Network Status’ anymore. Although my miner shows a Green Light.
Any ideas? If you can help, would be greatly appreciated.
Im still mining, and receiving HNT, but unsure if im maximising my miner, if it not set up correctly.
Thanks
Michael
It sounds like the app information isn’t syncing up. This may not be much to worry about yet. How long have you been giving for it to change? It may fix itself as that has happened a lot in the past.
If this has been going on for several days or longer though then it probably wouldn’t hurt to reset the hotspot. You may want to run the speed test on it as well to make sure (especially if it’s on WiFi) that it is getting decent speeds (if it says 0 then it’s probably not getting a good signal).
It may just take time but depending on how long you’ve waited there’s a few ideas to try at least!
Hi James,
I did wonder if it could be just the app not syncing up properly. It was good to see the ‘Gap’, and ‘Network Status’ before, but now just a ‘-‘ there. Its only happened recently. Its been running fine for over a month.
Its been about a week since i rebooted it (for the same issue).
The miner is on ethernet in my loft (from a powerplug) Speed is 15 down & 4 up.
I have ‘reset’ the miner, but still same issues.
Appreciate the help.
Thanks
Great testing, you’ve checked all the right places here for sure. The speed looks more than fine as well. Does power cycling it fix this, or I take it that maybe it fixed it last time?
This has happened with my original Bobcat a few times over it’s life. One of those times it took the reset to fix it and the other few times it fixed itself eventually. If your points earnings are okay I would power cycle it to get it going and then see if there isn’t a firmware update within the next week or two to address it.
Since you’ve already done the reset though I think it’s going to be a wait and see thing and if it continues to have problems it may be worth reaching out to Bobcat but I’d be willing to guess this will resolve itself within the next week or two!
JamesS
2 years ago
Hi James,
I’d like to second the comments thanking you for the best guide on resolving the related status issue!
I received my Bobcat300 last week, and set it up three days ago. My ISP is Verizon, and I have an “Internet Gateway” 4G LTE router, which does not have any option in the admin settings specifically called port forwarding. However, I have been able to set a static IP for the Bobcat, enable UPnP, put it in the router’s DMZ, and set up a “Virtual Server” which seems to allow me has the following options that seem to forward ports to the Bobcat:
I also called Verizon and asked about opening ports and if they had anything they could do to unblock ports, and they told me that they do not block any ports on their end. I did receive some rewards in this setup, but I am seeing conflicting information between the Bobber app, the Bobcat Diagnoser, and Hotspotty, so I’m not sure if my setup is fully working.
Hotspotty: When I do the “Real Time Status Check”, it shows that I am Online, Not Relayed, and passes all the Ping Tests. I have also done a port check through hotspotty, and it passes when I point it to my public IP and port 44158.
Bobber app: In the top menu, it shows that I am online, but relayed. Below the menu, it shows: Light: Green
Gap: 3
Sync Status: Sycned
Network Status: Good
Miner State: Running
In the Bobber Diagnostic Report, it shows a green check by my outbound and inbound Peer to Peer connections, and that I am 100% synced.
In the diagnoser, it shows: "p2p_status": [
"+---------+-------+",
"| name |result |",
"+---------+-------+",
"|connected| yes |",
"|dialable | yes |",
"|nat_type | none |",
"| height |1386575|",
"+---------+-------+",
],
"miner_height": "1386575",
"epoch": "37295",
"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": {
"192.168.0.216:22": "open",
"192.168.0.216:44158": "open",
"75.216.XXX.XX:22": "closed/timeout",
"75.216.XXX.XX:44158": "closed/timeout"
},
"private_ip": "192.168.0.216",
"public_ip": "75.216.XXX.XX",
I’m mainly confused why the diagnoser would show that my public IP ports are closed, but Hotspotty is able to make a connection and I pass the port check. Any idea what is going on here and how I can fix it? I’m wondering if I just need to wait a while for all of this to clear and to sync with the network for a while. Thanks!
This rule looks right to me except for what it’s saying to do is port forward any traffic on ports 20-44158. That means if someone tries to connect to port 80 on your public IP address for example (the normal http port) it would actually get forwarded to 44158. I would change this rule to just do 44158 for the external port as well but I don’t think this is actually the problem.
NAT is looking good. Listening address looks right here. No sign of double NAT or anything like that here. What happens when you use the external port checking tools on it? Does it say it’s “open” if you do one of the external port checkers to your public IP on 44158?
How long has the networking configuration been correct? You said you set it up about 3 days ago. Was this within the past 24 hours? If the external port checkers are showing as okay then I’m guessing you’re just being hit by the infamous super slow Helium status updates. We’ve seen it take 12 hours to anything like several days although several days is pretty unusual.
The defining test I like to use when everything looks right like this is the external port checkers. My current dynamic IP is 174.23.143.1 and if you put that in there along with 44158 you’ll see that it’s “open”.
If your public IP address returns the same as mine when you go to this address then we have narrowed it down to a Helium status update issue. That is good because time will take care of that. You just don’t want to keep changing the networking if this is the case because we’ve had people “break” it again many times by not waiting long enough and assuming there was more wrong. This is the most frustrating part for sure of trying to fix these (the waiting).
Everything looks good from what I can see here so let’s see what the external port checker shows and if it looks good then it should only be a matter of time!
I made the changes to the virtual server settings you recommended…a couple hours after I set that up this morning, I started getting errors from the app saying my miner was offline, so I realized the mistake. Just fixed it.
The networking configuration has been showing correct in the last 24 hours. I was playing around with having the miner in the DMZ, turning UPnP off and on, and using the virtual server. This morning I turned all three on which was when HotSpotty started showing that my miner was online and not relayed.
I just went to the port checker that you linked, and my public IP with port 44158 is Open! So that should be all good. I guess now I just need to wait and let the miner do it’s thing. You’re right, that’s definitely the hardest part. After waiting 26 weeks from the time I ordered, I’m ready to mine! I’ll check back in later to let you (and everyone else) know if time fixed things.
Excellent, I’m glad you got that fixed here! I think it will switch over here sometime today or tomorrow at the very worst case scenario but everything sounds like it’s in order now and happy!
I think it will come through here. Let us know when it does if you wouldn’t mind!
Update! Bobber app has started showing that I am out of relayed status, and I had a Broadcast beacon reward last night. Hotspotty is also showing that I am online, not related, but still Syncing. When I do a diagnose within bobber, it’s showing that I am 100% synced though, so probably just need to wait for a Helium status update.
I did notice when I just checked the diagnoser though, that my NAT is now showing as Symmetric, and the listener address is garbled. Looking closer, my public IP address has changed. I just checked the portchecker tool and I can still ping port 44158 at the new IP. Is that going to be an issue if my IP keeps changing?
Great question and I don’t think this has come up before. So I also have a dynamic IP. It won’t hurt it *mostly* but I don’t want to say there’s no impact.
When my IP address changes (every maybe 5-7 days or so but it seems to vary, if I don’t reboot my router for a long time I can keep one for longer I think) that change isn’t reflected instantly on the Helium network. This means that there’s some gap for a few hours or so when my IP changes that if someone tried to send my point a beacon for example it might try to connect to my old IP and fail.
Your issue sounds a little bit different here. The first thing I’d do is try restarting the Bobcat and waiting for a bit and see if that is a faulty status. Symmetrical NAT is typically either from your ISP or from your network configuration. It’s not something that should just happen though. If nothing with your network changed I’d try power cycling the Bobcat and see if it goes back to normal with something that simple.
I think you are probably okay here except for the miner showing the symmetrical NAT. I’m curious if restarting it will fix it (it should theoretically, because it will redetect the network settings and should recognize the change). Mine definitely doesn’t start showing symmetrical NAT but sometimes it will turn yellow when my IP changes occasionally until I power cycle it. Hopefully that helps!
Checked again and NAT is back to None. I’ll just keep an eye on it and try a reboot if I see it’s anything else. Thanks again so much for this resource and for your help in getting my miner online!
No problem at all, it definitely sounds like you’re on the right track here, take care!
Jack
2 years ago
Hi James, I’m so glad i’ve found your site you really are providing value here by genuinely helping people 🙂
I’m wondering if there’s something i’ve done wrong or missed…
Firstly I’m in the UK, my bobcat was initially relayed so i set a static ip for the bobcat and port forwarded my router to 44158. I’ve confirmed the ports are actually open using portchecker etc. and the relayed status disappeared (hooray) in a day or so. A few days passed in none relayed status however it’s still not actually mining, I’ve received 0.15 HNT over the last 14/15 days and now there is an orange ‘Needs attention’ banner and when i click on it it says hotspot is offline and not synching and i keep getting notifications says hotspot has not done anything in the last few thousand blocks…. Ports are still open, green light is on, synch status synched, network status good, outbound/inbound green tick, last challenged 2 days ago, NAT type none.
I feel like i’ve done something wrong here as i said 0.15 hnt over 15 days doesn’t seem like the hotspot is actually active…
Welcome! Does this happen to be a Bobcat? For one like this I think it’s probably time for a “Reset Miner” from the Bobcat Diagnoser (or other manufacturer’s equivalent option).
This will basically redownload the Helium software and blockchain from scratch. There have been a lot of weird network issues over the past few months that were definitely firmware related. Any one of them could have potentially broken something / caused this corruption on the storage. Clearing it out and downloading it again will usually fix this.
Speed test looks okay except the upload is 0. Is this wireless? It may be getting a bad WiFi signal. We’ve definitely seen that cause issues like this before. One person had it next to their fridge that was getting this and it turned out the fridge was blocking most of the WiFi signal. They moved it slightly across the room and the WiFi signal improved and the upload speed on their speed test went back above 0 and then this issue went away.
Those are a couple of the most likely suspects from my experience working with others here in the comments. Hopefully that helps!
Hi thanks for the response, yes it is indeed a Bobcat and it was on a WiFi connection. I did the Reset Miner as suggested and gave it a day. The orange banner has gone back to online, however the miner is still just dormant. I tried a speed test again and was the same; 5Mbits Download, 0Mbits upload. Ive just tried switching to ethernet and ran a speed test and it’s exactly the same but latency has gone down a bit. Transmit scale is still 0.34 and it’s just not doing anything 🙁
Great additional info! My guess is that you have a *lot* of competition. The amount of data packets and things like that in the area probably have a lot of hotspots to choose from. It’s definitely a good sign it’s back online.
What does your map look like near you? Are there a lot of hotspots near it on the Helium explorer? Those are all competing points that any one of them could claim that data packet / credit if that makes sense.
The best way to be sure it’s all working correctly is open the Helium explorer and go to the nearby points to you and compare your earnings. Are they earning way more than you or does it look about average for the area?
Yes there are a few miners in my hex (4 including mine) but everyone else’s earnings are orders of magnitude higher than my own, hence my annoyance haha. I may be forced to try relocate to my parents house possibly…
You may want to try moving the antenna to various places to experiment as well. I’ve heard stories of people putting them behind windows that have “Low-e” coating which is a material meant to block out UV light. It also severely weakens wireless signals as well. This is just an example though as I know you said yours is placed differently than this. It may be worth moving/adjusting it though to see if you can influence it.
There may be something unexpected interfering with it. It could be a different piece of equipment giving off a bunch of interference and sometimes this comes from really unexpected places. I think this is extra worth it for you to try because of your WiFi signal as well. The 0 upload tells us something does seem to be interfering with it (either the range or active interference).
Another thing you may want to do is try with the stock antenna. 8dBi and 6dBi antennas are extremely directional. The stock antenna is almost a perfect bubble. You may get higher earnings / better results in your case with such a low transmit power rate. In other words, it may make sense for you to not go for distance (there’s no point with a 0.25 transmit factor, they are limiting you because there’s a lot of hotspots in the area already so they want stronger more localized coverage) and to go for coverage. The stock antenna is almost a 360 degree perfect circle coverage while the 6dBi and 8dBi antennas have an extremely “flat” signal shape (not 360 degrees coverage or even close for the bigger sizes, they almost always miss everything above and below).
If that doesn’t get it then it may be worth relocating. Best of luck and hopefully that helps!
Chris
2 years ago
Hi James and hi to everyone.
Can anyone please help me with my Bobcat 300? I live in London and I got an antenna of 8.5 dbi. It’s a good one and I placed it on the roof. It’s like 15 meters high. From what I can see, everything is running fine and the miner does mine once a day or once every two days. the mining is like 0.017 or so. I have not witnessed more than two other miners. On the app it says it’s online and Transmit scale is 0.25. I did hear that 8.5dbi in city is not good so I ordered a 6.5 dbi. Is 6.5 dbi best? I have some TV antennas around the helium antenna and two dishes. When I am on roof, I can see almost 300 m on many sides but there are small buildings covering some space. Is this mining normal?
If the transmit level is only 0.25 that is 25% power basically. This happens in crowded areas where there’s a lot of hotspots. It means there are a few other hotspots not only within your “hex” but physically pretty close to your miner.
Funny enough, the person that made this reddit post was also in London. That’s a pretty low transmission scale for sure. They also tried a 8dBi and 6dBi antenna. It’s possible you will do better with the stock antenna in a crowded area but that person still seemed to do better with something like a 6 dBi. Hopefully that helps at least shed some light on it!
Adi
2 years ago
Hey James! Thank you for brief description for everything, but I have similar issue like Ashley did.
My bobcat miner 300 gives me this message: 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”
Both inbound and outbound are showing it’s ok, green light is on, connection on, but it’s in a relayed status.
I’m having 2 routers, one is for main ISP (DSL) and I’ve connected miner with ethernet cable with this one. The other router is TP-LINK I’m using for wireless connection only. Now, the first ISP router (DSL) is Cisco epc3928s, and when I fix IP address and do port forwarding (disabled uPNP as well), I’m still not able to fix it. On http://www.portchecker.co it says my port 44158 is closed :/
I’m not sure what to do, can you help?
Thanks in advance
These are always pretty tough ones but I do have a few things from previous experience here to check for sure. Now you’re definitely on the right track with the two routers. We’ve definitely had that be the cause many times before as you cannot port forward across two private networks.
Now if I am understanding correctly it sounds like you tried to directly connect the miner to the DSL modem (where the port forwarding entry is). This is good and the perfect test to do. The bridge mode is also a workable solution that I’ve covered here as well but honestly if you are directly connecting the miner to the DSL modem (your internet gateway) then it should be able to pull this off even if you have an additional WiFi network on a different router.
The most concerning part is the external port checker tools are still saying it’s closed. That does seem like there’s still a problem going on here. Another thing to check that has come up before is that a lot of the time it’s actually your ISP behind this.
I wouldn’t necessarily expect this with DSL but I’ve learned from experience not to assume the ISP experience I know in America (or even just my part of America) is anything close to other people’s experience/options. Wireless/5G is usually the most common type of ISP that blocks this but there are many other situations where this is the case (smaller regional ISPs, shared living situations like dorms or apartments with shared high speed internet, and others). Usually in these cases you just need to call your ISP and get the ability to open ports from a public IP address. They’ll usually have some kind of plan / addon you can use for this that has in the past been relatively cheap.
You may want to bluetooth in and make sure it has the IP addresses you are expecting. In a few cases we’ve had it end up being connected to some rogue neighbor network and things like that. It’s usually worth logging in and making sure it has an ethernet IP with exactly the address you expect (and is using the connections it’s supposed to be). Sometimes even just forgetting / resetting your connection within bluetooth will for some reason get it going sometimes (maybe it renews a lease, fixes something in cache, not sure why other than it works sometimes).
It really sounds like you’ve done everything right here so I think the ISP is worth investigating. Definitely keep checking with those external port tools as you’re testing it here as this is exactly how other miners connect to your miner so if those port checkers can’t hit it then something is still wrong and it’s not getting through. Have you ever opened any other ports before successfully with this service? It may just take a phone call or something like that to fix it here!
Hey James, thank you for your detailed explanation and answer. In the meantime, it happened that I saw within miner diagnostic (via web) miner.json file, that my listen_addrs was my public address, which means that I’ve successfully opened that port 44158, even though under the ports object on the report file it says my public address is “closed/timeout”.
I have been following this message, exactly second part of the sentence: “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” so I’ve concluded that it’s working fine, I saw there is some kind of small earnings on my account. But this morning I woke up and opened diagnoser and again saw that my router is Relayed :/
No problem at all! At least it sounds right that it’s working in relayed now (that’s a good sign, that’s what it should be doing even if the connection is not quite right). It will still earn in relayed status and now we just need to get it green to get rid of any relayed penalties.
The port 22 message is trying to say that you don’t need to port forward port 22 to your router. It’s only used by their remote support. They’re basically saying that it’s not necessary to forward that one.
Mine has it too so it’s just for informational purposes. Mine looks like this (fully open and sync’d / working):
"p2p_status": [
"+---------+-------+",
"| name |result |",
"+---------+-------+",
"|connected| yes |",
"|dialable | yes |",
"|nat_type | none |",
"| height |1375120|",
"+---------+-------+",
"",
""
],
"miner_height": "1375120",
"epoch": "36949",
"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": {
"174.23.170.X:22": "open",
"174.23.170.X:44158": "open",
"192.168.1.82:22": "open",
"192.168.1.82:44158": "open"
},
"private_ip": "192.168.1.82",
"public_ip": "174.23.170.X",
They aren’t kidding about that part not being accurate for port 22. I’ve never had that port opened / forwarded to the miner in over a year. Basically I wouldn’t worry about that part of the “desc” message. I think it’s for information only. Now that the point is earning and is relayed I think you’re on the right track talking to the ISP.
Let us know how it turns out / if you need anything further!
},
"p2p_status": [
"+---------+-------+",
"| name |result |",
"+---------+-------+",
"|connected| yes |",
"|dialable | yes |",
"|nat_type | none |",
"| height |1375155|",
"+---------+-------+",
"",
""
],
"miner_height": "1375155",
"epoch": "36950",
"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": {
"192.168.0.11:22": "open",
"192.168.0.11:44158": "open",
"77.77.222.XX:22": "closed/timeout",
"77.77.222.XX:44158": "closed/timeout"
},
"private_ip": "192.168.0.11",
"public_ip": "77.77.222.XX",
And again now, my listen_addrs is looking like this:
That definitely looks like a “relayed” connection to me on port 2560 as mine is actually showing as listening on 44158. Definitely seems like ISP quirkiness or it may be worth making sure you have your miner directly connected to the internet gateway with the port forwarding entry going directly to the miner. The ISP is probably worth a shot!
Is this a new point or did it happen out of the blue? I’d definitely power cycle it and make sure it’s really connected. If everything is showing green it should definitely start getting some activity here though.
Even in relayed mode you should still earn a little bit / get some activity so it seems like something else is wrong. If this is a Bobcat you could do the “Reset Miner” option to see if something is stuck in there and that gets it going!
Hi James and also to everyone here. I hope you guys are having a great time wherever you might be.
James, would you be able to help me understand few things about my setup.?
I have two antenna and bobcat 300. 8 dbi and 4 dbi. My question is this. Would it be possible to have two antennas mounted to my miner? Has anyone done this?
The other question is this. Why is my miner doing the mining only few times a day and not every 20 to 30 minutes? I’m in London\UK and the city is really big. I should be getting rewarded every few minutes. The reason I took two antennas is to have this 4 dbi picking up those close to me and the 8 dbi to reach those outside London. The 8 dbi when in use can go sometime over 50 km away.
Hopefully I’m not taking too much of your time to help me.
Thank you.
Hey Tony,
Welcome! So London has come up a few times around here and what we’ve learned is that there seems to be so many hotspots there that there is dramatic capping going on on the points. This includes lowering the maximum transmit power and lower activity levels for sure. Helium basically is turning down transmit power and reducing activity in areas that are extremely busy. There’s a few in the US like in California as well that I’ve heard of so many points that people’s transmit scale is vastly reduced.
Chris was also from London and his transmission power was scaled all the way down to 25%.
So basically to bring all this together about the two antennas I’m certain that it won’t let you do this as they’re already taking measures to reduce the transmit power of the one antenna you have that you are supposed to if that makes sense. They’re trying in your area to reduce traffic and congestion by basically having the points handicap themselves to lower transmit levels and it definitely wouldn’t use a second antenna even if it was capable of doing it for this reason. Your main one is probably scaled like Chris’ and some other people from London I’ve talked to unfortunately.
To put transmit power scaling of 25% in perspective if you have something like a 8 dBi antenna it would turn it into a 2 dBi antenna (roughly speaking, it’s not as simple as I’m describing it but in the end the rough numbers are close enough for our purposes). The Helium transmit scaling is basically turning that giant 8 dBi antenna into the same as a stock Bobcat antenna so this effect is dramatic. The 8 dBi antenna would still have the same disadvantages as a 8 dBi antenna always has such as a very long, flat signal so it would almost certainly be worse than the stock Bobcat antenna at 2 dBi which makes a full circle type of field instead of a very long flat one like a 8 dBi does.
It’s always tough to give advice to people in London facing this as it seems to be the location that causes such intense scaling/penalties and I’m not sure there’s really a good solution for this at the moment. Hopefully it helps explain what is happening a little at least!
Thank you so much for replying. So I wasted close to £90 for this 8 dbi in thinking it would work? A lot of people online keep saying you should have 6 dbi or 8 dbi so you can escape the city and reach the ones that are outside London. So helium mining inside cities like London is actually pointless.? When I have the 4 dbi antenna it mines just few times a day. Is that normal? Should the mining happen more often?
Hey Tony,
That’s a very, very good question and one that has been debated for quite some time. Here’s an example about London specifically. That reddit thread was basically arguing just that as a huge portion of the map is well within the “0 earnings” red range and that was 7 months ago.
For the antenna as to whether or not it’s a waste I think the answer is probably but it depends. Are you more near the outskirts? If you go on the Helium explorer and click around the map in your area is anyone earning anything significant? This is actually the best way to tell that I’ve found is to zoom around the hexes where your point is and examine the other points and see how they’re doing and what power level of antenna they are using (you can see this). Depending on your location it may be worthwhile.
If your antenna is within the return period that may be worth doing but it will depend on what turns up when you investigate the Helium explorer around your point and compare it with others to see what they’re doing.
The issue is that you will max out on your # of points you can hit with your beacon probably before the end of the street let alone the outskirts. They keep lowering the # of points you can ping until you “max” out but mine seem to be stopping at 14. There are probably substantially more than 14 points within range of your hotspot so it would never make it that far out before it hits the cap if that makes sense. It’s a lot easier to see this on the Helium explorer web site because they removed everything to do with beacons from the app.
It’s a really tough market and it’s hard to imagine a Helium antenna being worth getting in this environment to be perfectly honest no matter where it is. Mine has been earning something like 18-25 cents for a while now. When I first got it I would literally make $50-$60 a day (there were even a couple $100 days). Even a couple of months ago though it was at least a dollar and change per day though and now it’s completely evaporated into almost nothing. I actually have a Nebra point that I opened up just to see the Pi in it:
This is a sad admission but this is so much cooler to me than using it as a Helium point to make 20 cents a day. I’ve literally had it for months and just registered it today as I’ve been playing with it recently but I missed literally < $50-$80 worth of profits at the most with it letting it sit and if I let it sit now for the same time period I would miss out on far less than that. Having a nice outdoor contained Pi setup like that is really cool though and I may have more uses for that. People are selling Nebra outdoors for $300 and less on eBay and that Pi inside it is probably half the value of it even though it's an old Compute Module 3 (the plain 3, not the 3+, and definitely last gen tech and not by today's standards, last gen already when they were made and priced at several hundred + dollars for a Pi they literally paid single digit dollars for). The Pis are really valuable right now due to the Pi shortage (which Helium manufacturers definitely played a real part in). I bet they paid no more than $50 for everything inside that box put together and the LoRa chips were probably the pricier parts. This is what Helium has felt like since the start pretty much. You're basically always someone's greater fool watching them take the only real money that will be made in Helium and you have a vague understanding and constant little reminders of that the whole time and it just feels... bad. It felt the same for me starting as insane as $60 per day might sound right now I was the greater fool to everyone who was in earlier and had more insider information and I knew it / could see and feel it from day 1. People in really early got to participate in the validator pool occasionally which could be as much as $5000 in 24 hours. All of my memories of the project are of them slowly taking very profitable things away. Another common thing you will hear is that every Helium update makes it worse and I legitimately think that’s true especially over the long term. The team could have taken this project in a completely different direction but they got paid and their partners got paid and are still trying to run the exact same scam/playbook with 5G and I’m just not playing this time even if my order was in early enough to “win”.
If we’re being totally honest (and I always am here) I would not recommend Helium mining right now to anyone and if you had a point preordered I would not spend one single penny on accessories on it and just try to recoup what you can and probably hold onto it until a bull market where you may be glad you have it again.
I cancelled all of my 5G preorders months ago because frankly the Helium team just keeps making mining worse and worse. First they got rid of regular points being validators, now we’re all becoming “Lite” points where essentially only 4% of rewards will go to the “old” LoRa network (subject to change and probably already has but that is what they are trying to do).
It’s not what I signed up for and not what they promised although some people reading this may disagree and be trying 5G (who knows, it may pay off but I’m very tired of crypto projects not living up to their promises or even really trying to and I really have no interest in anything but BTC at the moment).
People who get into 5G early enough will get paid (they’ll make sure of it, and in all the plans I’ve seen at our “light” points expense, and you’ll see the posts from people saying SEE IT PAID OFF but but it’s literally just part of the plan or nobody will get excited and buy too late) but that’s just the thing with crypto that I’m really sick of and want to see someone build something for the long term / really community and people oriented.
For Helium especially early on it definitely appeared to be true and that this was a network for the people by the people. I’m guessing historically when things really started to go south was when they banned people making their own homebrew points and made you have to buy it from an “approved” manufacturer. I knew that when I bought and looking back that is the red flag that I kick myself for ignoring now (I knew I could easily build one of these and I was going to but it was already too late). It was to fight spoofing but spoofing still remains a huge problem and closed-sourcing the hardware/platform directly led to this dirt cheap hardware marked up 10,000%+ with absurd delivery times.
Crypto really is just junk if we can’t achieve something longer term that benefits everyone participating and I’ve never had more doubts than I do right now due to the direction the entire industry is moving especially with mining and moving to proof of stake (only good with lots of $$ to start with) practically industry-wide. BTC is still the closest to anything that I would remotely refer to as “good” or “fair” and that is absolutely pathetic and frankly damning of every other crypto project that really should be justifying why it even exists right now.
That definitely includes Ethereum which is also a terrible, terrible project toward users/miners with absolutely hilariously atrocious fees and their DApp party trick is hardly unique or special at this point and other chains are doing that better too (for WAY cheaper).
Sorry for not having better news as I always try to give that when it’s possible but you are definitely onto something with your frustration here I’m afraid. Hopefully that helps!
Hi James,
I have a Bobcat300. I have changed my router recently, and have port forwarded 44158, set DMZ, and reserved the IP address for the miner.
I did this on my old router to get rid of ‘relayed’ status.
The Bobber app (Hotspots tab) says ‘relayed’ all the time. I dont quite understand if its right or wrong? As in the Bobber App diagnoser it doesnt say ‘relayed’.
I have read that with ‘Light Hotspots’ update which i assume i have got now, ‘relayed’ doesnt happen anymore. So unsure if im ‘relayed’ or not.
In the Bobber App, Hotspots Tab, Status, i can’t see ‘Gap’, or ‘Network Status’ anymore. Although my miner shows a Green Light.
Any ideas? If you can help, would be greatly appreciated.
Im still mining, and receiving HNT, but unsure if im maximising my miner, if it not set up correctly.
Thanks
Michael
Hey Michael,
It sounds like the app information isn’t syncing up. This may not be much to worry about yet. How long have you been giving for it to change? It may fix itself as that has happened a lot in the past.
If this has been going on for several days or longer though then it probably wouldn’t hurt to reset the hotspot. You may want to run the speed test on it as well to make sure (especially if it’s on WiFi) that it is getting decent speeds (if it says 0 then it’s probably not getting a good signal).
It may just take time but depending on how long you’ve waited there’s a few ideas to try at least!
Hi James,
I did wonder if it could be just the app not syncing up properly. It was good to see the ‘Gap’, and ‘Network Status’ before, but now just a ‘-‘ there. Its only happened recently. Its been running fine for over a month.
Its been about a week since i rebooted it (for the same issue).
The miner is on ethernet in my loft (from a powerplug) Speed is 15 down & 4 up.
I have ‘reset’ the miner, but still same issues.
Appreciate the help.
Thanks
Hey Michael,
Great testing, you’ve checked all the right places here for sure. The speed looks more than fine as well. Does power cycling it fix this, or I take it that maybe it fixed it last time?
This has happened with my original Bobcat a few times over it’s life. One of those times it took the reset to fix it and the other few times it fixed itself eventually. If your points earnings are okay I would power cycle it to get it going and then see if there isn’t a firmware update within the next week or two to address it.
Since you’ve already done the reset though I think it’s going to be a wait and see thing and if it continues to have problems it may be worth reaching out to Bobcat but I’d be willing to guess this will resolve itself within the next week or two!
Hi James,
I’d like to second the comments thanking you for the best guide on resolving the related status issue!
I received my Bobcat300 last week, and set it up three days ago. My ISP is Verizon, and I have an “Internet Gateway” 4G LTE router, which does not have any option in the admin settings specifically called port forwarding. However, I have been able to set a static IP for the Bobcat, enable UPnP, put it in the router’s DMZ, and set up a “Virtual Server” which seems to allow me has the following options that seem to forward ports to the Bobcat:
HeliumExternal Port: 20-44158
Internal IP: 192.168.0.216
Internal Port: 44158-44158
Protocol: All
I also called Verizon and asked about opening ports and if they had anything they could do to unblock ports, and they told me that they do not block any ports on their end. I did receive some rewards in this setup, but I am seeing conflicting information between the Bobber app, the Bobcat Diagnoser, and Hotspotty, so I’m not sure if my setup is fully working.
Hotspotty: When I do the “Real Time Status Check”, it shows that I am Online, Not Relayed, and passes all the Ping Tests. I have also done a port check through hotspotty, and it passes when I point it to my public IP and port 44158.
Bobber app: In the top menu, it shows that I am online, but relayed. Below the menu, it shows:
Light: GreenGap: 3
Sync Status: Sycned
Network Status: Good
Miner State: Running
In the Bobber Diagnostic Report, it shows a green check by my outbound and inbound Peer to Peer connections, and that I am 100% synced.
In the diagnoser, it shows:
"p2p_status": ["+---------+-------+",
"| name |result |",
"+---------+-------+",
"|connected| yes |",
"|dialable | yes |",
"|nat_type | none |",
"| height |1386575|",
"+---------+-------+",
],
"miner_height": "1386575",
"epoch": "37295",
"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": {
"192.168.0.216:22": "open",
"192.168.0.216:44158": "open",
"75.216.XXX.XX:22": "closed/timeout",
"75.216.XXX.XX:44158": "closed/timeout"
},
"private_ip": "192.168.0.216",
"public_ip": "75.216.XXX.XX",
"+----------------------------+",
"| listen_addrs (prioritized) |",
"+----------------------------+",
"|/ip4/75.216.XXX.XX/tcp/44158|",
"+----------------------------+",
I’m mainly confused why the diagnoser would show that my public IP ports are closed, but Hotspotty is able to make a connection and I pass the port check. Any idea what is going on here and how I can fix it? I’m wondering if I just need to wait a while for all of this to clear and to sync with the network for a while. Thanks!
Hey James,
This is a really tricky one! Let’s start with the DMZ settings:
HeliumExternal Port: 20-44158
Internal IP: 192.168.0.216
Internal Port: 44158-44158
Protocol: All
This rule looks right to me except for what it’s saying to do is port forward any traffic on ports 20-44158. That means if someone tries to connect to port 80 on your public IP address for example (the normal http port) it would actually get forwarded to 44158. I would change this rule to just do 44158 for the external port as well but I don’t think this is actually the problem.
NAT is looking good. Listening address looks right here. No sign of double NAT or anything like that here. What happens when you use the external port checking tools on it? Does it say it’s “open” if you do one of the external port checkers to your public IP on 44158?
How long has the networking configuration been correct? You said you set it up about 3 days ago. Was this within the past 24 hours? If the external port checkers are showing as okay then I’m guessing you’re just being hit by the infamous super slow Helium status updates. We’ve seen it take 12 hours to anything like several days although several days is pretty unusual.
The defining test I like to use when everything looks right like this is the external port checkers. My current dynamic IP is 174.23.143.1 and if you put that in there along with 44158 you’ll see that it’s “open”.
If your public IP address returns the same as mine when you go to this address then we have narrowed it down to a Helium status update issue. That is good because time will take care of that. You just don’t want to keep changing the networking if this is the case because we’ve had people “break” it again many times by not waiting long enough and assuming there was more wrong. This is the most frustrating part for sure of trying to fix these (the waiting).
Everything looks good from what I can see here so let’s see what the external port checker shows and if it looks good then it should only be a matter of time!
Thanks so much for the quick reply!
I made the changes to the virtual server settings you recommended…a couple hours after I set that up this morning, I started getting errors from the app saying my miner was offline, so I realized the mistake. Just fixed it.
The networking configuration has been showing correct in the last 24 hours. I was playing around with having the miner in the DMZ, turning UPnP off and on, and using the virtual server. This morning I turned all three on which was when HotSpotty started showing that my miner was online and not relayed.
I just went to the port checker that you linked, and my public IP with port 44158 is Open! So that should be all good. I guess now I just need to wait and let the miner do it’s thing. You’re right, that’s definitely the hardest part. After waiting 26 weeks from the time I ordered, I’m ready to mine! I’ll check back in later to let you (and everyone else) know if time fixed things.
Hey James,
Excellent, I’m glad you got that fixed here! I think it will switch over here sometime today or tomorrow at the very worst case scenario but everything sounds like it’s in order now and happy!
I think it will come through here. Let us know when it does if you wouldn’t mind!
Hey James,
Update! Bobber app has started showing that I am out of relayed status, and I had a Broadcast beacon reward last night. Hotspotty is also showing that I am online, not related, but still Syncing. When I do a diagnose within bobber, it’s showing that I am 100% synced though, so probably just need to wait for a Helium status update.
I did notice when I just checked the diagnoser though, that my NAT is now showing as Symmetric, and the listener address is garbled. Looking closer, my public IP address has changed. I just checked the portchecker tool and I can still ping port 44158 at the new IP. Is that going to be an issue if my IP keeps changing?
Hey JamesS,
Great question and I don’t think this has come up before. So I also have a dynamic IP. It won’t hurt it *mostly* but I don’t want to say there’s no impact.
When my IP address changes (every maybe 5-7 days or so but it seems to vary, if I don’t reboot my router for a long time I can keep one for longer I think) that change isn’t reflected instantly on the Helium network. This means that there’s some gap for a few hours or so when my IP changes that if someone tried to send my point a beacon for example it might try to connect to my old IP and fail.
Your issue sounds a little bit different here. The first thing I’d do is try restarting the Bobcat and waiting for a bit and see if that is a faulty status. Symmetrical NAT is typically either from your ISP or from your network configuration. It’s not something that should just happen though. If nothing with your network changed I’d try power cycling the Bobcat and see if it goes back to normal with something that simple.
I think you are probably okay here except for the miner showing the symmetrical NAT. I’m curious if restarting it will fix it (it should theoretically, because it will redetect the network settings and should recognize the change). Mine definitely doesn’t start showing symmetrical NAT but sometimes it will turn yellow when my IP changes occasionally until I power cycle it. Hopefully that helps!
Checked again and NAT is back to None. I’ll just keep an eye on it and try a reboot if I see it’s anything else. Thanks again so much for this resource and for your help in getting my miner online!
Hey JamesS,
No problem at all, it definitely sounds like you’re on the right track here, take care!
Hi James, I’m so glad i’ve found your site you really are providing value here by genuinely helping people 🙂
I’m wondering if there’s something i’ve done wrong or missed…
Firstly I’m in the UK, my bobcat was initially relayed so i set a static ip for the bobcat and port forwarded my router to 44158. I’ve confirmed the ports are actually open using portchecker etc. and the relayed status disappeared (hooray) in a day or so. A few days passed in none relayed status however it’s still not actually mining, I’ve received 0.15 HNT over the last 14/15 days and now there is an orange ‘Needs attention’ banner and when i click on it it says hotspot is offline and not synching and i keep getting notifications says hotspot has not done anything in the last few thousand blocks…. Ports are still open, green light is on, synch status synched, network status good, outbound/inbound green tick, last challenged 2 days ago, NAT type none.
I feel like i’ve done something wrong here as i said 0.15 hnt over 15 days doesn’t seem like the hotspot is actually active…
Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂
forgot to say aswell, i’ve done the speed test in the diagnose thing.
Downloadspeed: 5 Mbit/sUploadspeed: 0 Mbit/s
Latency: 43.915651ms
Hey Jack,
Welcome! Does this happen to be a Bobcat? For one like this I think it’s probably time for a “Reset Miner” from the Bobcat Diagnoser (or other manufacturer’s equivalent option).
This will basically redownload the Helium software and blockchain from scratch. There have been a lot of weird network issues over the past few months that were definitely firmware related. Any one of them could have potentially broken something / caused this corruption on the storage. Clearing it out and downloading it again will usually fix this.
Speed test looks okay except the upload is 0. Is this wireless? It may be getting a bad WiFi signal. We’ve definitely seen that cause issues like this before. One person had it next to their fridge that was getting this and it turned out the fridge was blocking most of the WiFi signal. They moved it slightly across the room and the WiFi signal improved and the upload speed on their speed test went back above 0 and then this issue went away.
Those are a couple of the most likely suspects from my experience working with others here in the comments. Hopefully that helps!
Hi thanks for the response, yes it is indeed a Bobcat and it was on a WiFi connection. I did the Reset Miner as suggested and gave it a day. The orange banner has gone back to online, however the miner is still just dormant. I tried a speed test again and was the same; 5Mbits Download, 0Mbits upload. Ive just tried switching to ethernet and ran a speed test and it’s exactly the same but latency has gone down a bit. Transmit scale is still 0.34 and it’s just not doing anything 🙁
Hey Jack,
Great additional info! My guess is that you have a *lot* of competition. The amount of data packets and things like that in the area probably have a lot of hotspots to choose from. It’s definitely a good sign it’s back online.
What does your map look like near you? Are there a lot of hotspots near it on the Helium explorer? Those are all competing points that any one of them could claim that data packet / credit if that makes sense.
The best way to be sure it’s all working correctly is open the Helium explorer and go to the nearby points to you and compare your earnings. Are they earning way more than you or does it look about average for the area?
Hey james,
Yes there are a few miners in my hex (4 including mine) but everyone else’s earnings are orders of magnitude higher than my own, hence my annoyance haha. I may be forced to try relocate to my parents house possibly…
Hey Jack,
You may want to try moving the antenna to various places to experiment as well. I’ve heard stories of people putting them behind windows that have “Low-e” coating which is a material meant to block out UV light. It also severely weakens wireless signals as well. This is just an example though as I know you said yours is placed differently than this. It may be worth moving/adjusting it though to see if you can influence it.
There may be something unexpected interfering with it. It could be a different piece of equipment giving off a bunch of interference and sometimes this comes from really unexpected places. I think this is extra worth it for you to try because of your WiFi signal as well. The 0 upload tells us something does seem to be interfering with it (either the range or active interference).
Another thing you may want to do is try with the stock antenna. 8dBi and 6dBi antennas are extremely directional. The stock antenna is almost a perfect bubble. You may get higher earnings / better results in your case with such a low transmit power rate. In other words, it may make sense for you to not go for distance (there’s no point with a 0.25 transmit factor, they are limiting you because there’s a lot of hotspots in the area already so they want stronger more localized coverage) and to go for coverage. The stock antenna is almost a 360 degree perfect circle coverage while the 6dBi and 8dBi antennas have an extremely “flat” signal shape (not 360 degrees coverage or even close for the bigger sizes, they almost always miss everything above and below).
If that doesn’t get it then it may be worth relocating. Best of luck and hopefully that helps!
Hi James and hi to everyone.
Can anyone please help me with my Bobcat 300? I live in London and I got an antenna of 8.5 dbi. It’s a good one and I placed it on the roof. It’s like 15 meters high. From what I can see, everything is running fine and the miner does mine once a day or once every two days. the mining is like 0.017 or so. I have not witnessed more than two other miners. On the app it says it’s online and Transmit scale is 0.25. I did hear that 8.5dbi in city is not good so I ordered a 6.5 dbi. Is 6.5 dbi best? I have some TV antennas around the helium antenna and two dishes. When I am on roof, I can see almost 300 m on many sides but there are small buildings covering some space. Is this mining normal?
Hey Chris,
If the transmit level is only 0.25 that is 25% power basically. This happens in crowded areas where there’s a lot of hotspots. It means there are a few other hotspots not only within your “hex” but physically pretty close to your miner.
Here’s a thread talking a little bit more about it.
Funny enough, the person that made this reddit post was also in London. That’s a pretty low transmission scale for sure. They also tried a 8dBi and 6dBi antenna. It’s possible you will do better with the stock antenna in a crowded area but that person still seemed to do better with something like a 6 dBi. Hopefully that helps at least shed some light on it!
Hey James! Thank you for brief description for everything, but I have similar issue like Ashley did.
My bobcat miner 300 gives me this message: 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”
Both inbound and outbound are showing it’s ok, green light is on, connection on, but it’s in a relayed status.
I’m having 2 routers, one is for main ISP (DSL) and I’ve connected miner with ethernet cable with this one. The other router is TP-LINK I’m using for wireless connection only. Now, the first ISP router (DSL) is Cisco epc3928s, and when I fix IP address and do port forwarding (disabled uPNP as well), I’m still not able to fix it. On http://www.portchecker.co it says my port 44158 is closed :/
I’m not sure what to do, can you help?
Thanks in advance
Hey Adi,
These are always pretty tough ones but I do have a few things from previous experience here to check for sure. Now you’re definitely on the right track with the two routers. We’ve definitely had that be the cause many times before as you cannot port forward across two private networks.
Now if I am understanding correctly it sounds like you tried to directly connect the miner to the DSL modem (where the port forwarding entry is). This is good and the perfect test to do. The bridge mode is also a workable solution that I’ve covered here as well but honestly if you are directly connecting the miner to the DSL modem (your internet gateway) then it should be able to pull this off even if you have an additional WiFi network on a different router.
The most concerning part is the external port checker tools are still saying it’s closed. That does seem like there’s still a problem going on here. Another thing to check that has come up before is that a lot of the time it’s actually your ISP behind this.
I wouldn’t necessarily expect this with DSL but I’ve learned from experience not to assume the ISP experience I know in America (or even just my part of America) is anything close to other people’s experience/options. Wireless/5G is usually the most common type of ISP that blocks this but there are many other situations where this is the case (smaller regional ISPs, shared living situations like dorms or apartments with shared high speed internet, and others). Usually in these cases you just need to call your ISP and get the ability to open ports from a public IP address. They’ll usually have some kind of plan / addon you can use for this that has in the past been relatively cheap.
You may want to bluetooth in and make sure it has the IP addresses you are expecting. In a few cases we’ve had it end up being connected to some rogue neighbor network and things like that. It’s usually worth logging in and making sure it has an ethernet IP with exactly the address you expect (and is using the connections it’s supposed to be). Sometimes even just forgetting / resetting your connection within bluetooth will for some reason get it going sometimes (maybe it renews a lease, fixes something in cache, not sure why other than it works sometimes).
It really sounds like you’ve done everything right here so I think the ISP is worth investigating. Definitely keep checking with those external port tools as you’re testing it here as this is exactly how other miners connect to your miner so if those port checkers can’t hit it then something is still wrong and it’s not getting through. Have you ever opened any other ports before successfully with this service? It may just take a phone call or something like that to fix it here!
Hey James, thank you for your detailed explanation and answer. In the meantime, it happened that I saw within miner diagnostic (via web) miner.json file, that my listen_addrs was my public address, which means that I’ve successfully opened that port 44158, even though under the
portsobject on the report file it says my public address is “closed/timeout”.I have been following this message, exactly second part of the sentence: “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” so I’ve concluded that it’s working fine, I saw there is some kind of small earnings on my account. But this morning I woke up and opened diagnoser and again saw that my router is Relayed :/
I’ll call my ISP to see how it goes with them.
Thanks again!
Adi
Hey Adi,
No problem at all! At least it sounds right that it’s working in relayed now (that’s a good sign, that’s what it should be doing even if the connection is not quite right). It will still earn in relayed status and now we just need to get it green to get rid of any relayed penalties.
The port 22 message is trying to say that you don’t need to port forward port 22 to your router. It’s only used by their remote support. They’re basically saying that it’s not necessary to forward that one.
Mine has it too so it’s just for informational purposes. Mine looks like this (fully open and sync’d / working):
"p2p_status": ["+---------+-------+",
"| name |result |",
"+---------+-------+",
"|connected| yes |",
"|dialable | yes |",
"|nat_type | none |",
"| height |1375120|",
"+---------+-------+",
"",
""
],
"miner_height": "1375120",
"epoch": "36949",
"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": {
"174.23.170.X:22": "open",
"174.23.170.X:44158": "open",
"192.168.1.82:22": "open",
"192.168.1.82:44158": "open"
},
"private_ip": "192.168.1.82",
"public_ip": "174.23.170.X",
They aren’t kidding about that part not being accurate for port 22. I’ve never had that port opened / forwarded to the miner in over a year. Basically I wouldn’t worry about that part of the “desc” message. I think it’s for information only. Now that the point is earning and is relayed I think you’re on the right track talking to the ISP.
Let us know how it turns out / if you need anything further!
Hey James, this is how it looks on my side:
},"p2p_status": [
"+---------+-------+",
"| name |result |",
"+---------+-------+",
"|connected| yes |",
"|dialable | yes |",
"|nat_type | none |",
"| height |1375155|",
"+---------+-------+",
"",
""
],
"miner_height": "1375155",
"epoch": "36950",
"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": {
"192.168.0.11:22": "open",
"192.168.0.11:44158": "open",
"77.77.222.XX:22": "closed/timeout",
"77.77.222.XX:44158": "closed/timeout"
},
"private_ip": "192.168.0.11",
"public_ip": "77.77.222.XX",
And again now, my listen_addrs is looking like this:
listen_addrs (prioritized)|","+--------------------------+",
"|/ip4/77.77.222.XX/tcp/2560|
Hey Adi,
Yeah that definitely looks like the ISP blocking incoming connections to me from the “closed/timeout”. Here’s what my listener looks like:
"private_ip": "192.168.1.82","public_ip": "174.23.170.X",
"peerbook": [
"+---------------------------------------------+-----------------+----------+---------+---+----------+",
"| address | name |listen_add|connectio|nat|last_updat|",
"+---------------------------------------------+-----------------+----------+---------+---+----------+",
"|/p2p/X|shallow-X| 1 | 20 |non| 190.384s |",
"+---------------------------------------------+-----------------+----------+---------+---+----------+",
"",
"+-----------------------------+",
"| listen_addrs (prioritized) |",
"+-----------------------------+",
"|/ip4/174.23.170.X/tcp/44158|",
"+-----------------------------+",
That definitely looks like a “relayed” connection to me on port 2560 as mine is actually showing as listening on 44158. Definitely seems like ISP quirkiness or it may be worth making sure you have your miner directly connected to the internet gateway with the port forwarding entry going directly to the miner. The ISP is probably worth a shot!
Hey James, definitely it was due to the ISP. They’ve just changed my public IP address and opened port 44158 aaaand VOILA! It works!
Hi Craig, help. My transmission scale is green 1.00, status green and active. 4 days making no money, why ?
Active and doing nothing
Hey Poppy,
Is this a new point or did it happen out of the blue? I’d definitely power cycle it and make sure it’s really connected. If everything is showing green it should definitely start getting some activity here though.
Even in relayed mode you should still earn a little bit / get some activity so it seems like something else is wrong. If this is a Bobcat you could do the “Reset Miner” option to see if something is stuck in there and that gets it going!