How to calculate the new Helium 5G rewards of existing radios

‍

Why are rewards changing?

With the recent passing of HIP74. This had the effect of changing how rewards are issued. So this is an excellent time to learn how to calculate your earnings.

What has changed?

The hex size has shrunk considerably. The old hexes would show where the hotspot is located. Now the smaller hexes show the Helium 5G radio's coverage. The amount of coverage points is what will determine how many rewards you will earn.

Another important note is you will only be able to have five radios with overlapping coverage. What I mean by this is if six signals overlap in a single hex. Then the one with the weakest signal will not earn any rewards. Likewise, if they have equal signals, the ones added last would not earn rewards. These changes only affect Helium 5G. The LoRa explorer has not changed.

How do I calculate them?

First off, we need to use this new 5G Helium Explorer. You can access it here: https://coverage-explorer.herokuapp.com/

Keep in mind that if you just installed a radio, this explorer is currently updated once a week. You might not see your radio on there yet. Zoom into your location.

This is a single Baicells 430H. The average residential installation. The next step is to click on any of the hexes. This window will show up.

‍

You will then click on the radio at the bottom. Since there is only one radio here, we know it's a single radio installation. If there were multiple more would show up. The last number is the end of the radio's serial number.

‍

Total radio points are what we are after here. This radio has 1,376 points. This is everything we need from the Helium 5G explorer. To give aditional insight, a indoor radio will earn 1,000 points regardless where it is. Next is to perform the calculation.

Doing the math

Now that we know our reward points, we can plug them into the formula to get an idea of how many Mobile tokens we will earn. So this is the formula, don't panic.

I am going to make this easy and assume you are passing the speed test and your heartbeat is working correctly. With that that in mind, this is what we have so far

W = 1 x 1 x 1,376 x Wp

Wp is hard to know what the value should be. In the HIP, they use 6.54. That means you would get 6.54 Mobile tokens per reward point. To be clear, this is an estimate and will change.

W = 1 x 1 x 1,376 x 6.54

You should earn 8,999.04 Mobile tokens per day from this setup.

How to increase rewards

In this example, the earnings are low. From what we can tell, the radio used in this example are installed about 18ft high, pointing towards the street. When the 430H is very high (60ft+) without obstructions, you can see numbers up to 10,000 for reward points. That's 65,400 mobile tokens per day, a vast difference. Also, if you live near the water, it could make sense at the current time to aim it toward the water to get massive coverage and increase rewards. See below.

17,212 reward points, for a total of 112,566.48 Mobile tokens per day. Helium does not want coverage in the water, but it's something to take note of.

‍

Closing thoughts

I want to remind you one last time that the number 6.54 is an estimate used by the hip as an example. The amount of radio points should be real-world numbers. You can browse the map and click around to give yourself an accurate estimate of how many points you could earn. While the reward change has not come into effect yet. It will be coming in the future.