Now that you’re equipped with the best hardware and you have some locations in mind, let’s explore how to estimate your location’s Helium 5G mining potential.

How to Calculate Helium 5G Mining Rewards by Using the Helium Mobile Coverage Planner

Now, let’s get our hands dirty (figuratively, of course) with the Helium Mobile Coverage Planner. This tool is like your Helium 5G mining compass; it points you to where you can strike gold. Or in our case, $MOBILE tokens. It works by simulating your radio frequency coverage points and then calculating how many $MOBILE tokens you will earn per day at the given location. Here’s how to use it:

1. Head over to the Helium Mobile Coverage Planner. Click “Planner” then click “login”, you will be prompted for an email and they will send you a one-time code to easily log in.
   
2. Now that you are logged in, go to “Planner” then click “Create New Plan”.
3. This is where the magic happens. You are going to fill out information for each deployment location you are considering. This might be a house, apartment, commercial building, etc… In this example, we are going to model my friend’s apartment in a high-rise building in downtown San Diego. If you have multiple radios you will need to run a separate simulation for each radio with varying settings to provide more coverage and earn more MOBILE.
   
   

   Helium Mobile Coverage Planner Settings Guide

   1. Name: Name of the deployment e.g. “Paul’s House North/West 20th Floor”
   2. Address: The address of the location. Make sure to type it in then click the address from the drop-down to populate the latitude/longitude fields.
   3. Latitude/Longitude: These values should automatically populate when you type in the address AND click the correct address from the dropdown that appears. If you want to get an even more accurate latitude/longitude or if your address covers a large area, pull up your location on Google Maps and right-click the map in the location you plan on deploying the radio. You can then click the latitude/longitude from the popup and it will be copied to your clipboard.
   4. Antenna: There are a variety of Helium Mobile compatible antennas out there. However, for an outdoor setup, the Baicells Nova 430H is generally considered the gold standard as it maximizes your $MOBILE mining rewards to dollars invested (ROI). So we are going to focus on that for this guide. Note: This simulation will give you a coverage and rewards estimate for a single radio/antenna at a time. If you purchase and deploy a setup with 2-5 radio’s you would need to plan out the coverage for each antenna/radio separately.
   5. Height: How high will the antenna be above the ground? In this example, my friend lives on the 20th floor. So 20 floors x 12ft per floor = 240ft. If you were installing your radio on the roof of a 2-story home your height would be ~30 feet.
   6. Elevation: In this context, elevation refers to the tilt of the antenna (up or down). For most deployments a tilt of 0° is appropriate (horizontal). For my 20th-floor apartment example, I am going to angle my antenna down slightly, so I will enter an elevation of -20° (notice the negative). This means that my antenna will be angled 20° degrees down from horizontal. However, as you will see later in this guide, an elevation of 0° is actually going to provide better coverage and earn more $MOBILE. I recommend an elevation of 0° for 98% of deployments.
   7. Azimuth: Refers to the direction the antenna is facing, measured in degrees from True North. It helps in accurately aligning the antenna to maximize coverage and signal strength for optimal mining efficiency. Azimuth starts at 0° and is measured clockwise. For my example, my friend’s balcony faces North-West roughly 315°.
      

Now that you have your settings dialed in go ahead and smash the “Submit Coverage Plan”. Now we wait… generally 1-2 minutes but sometimes when they are experiencing heavy loads I have seen it take as long as 30-60 minutes.

While you wait, grab a cup of coffee and check out our Helium 5G Mining Hardware section.

Interpreting Your Helium Mobile Coverage Planner Results

Results #1: Below are the results from our example simulation with one Baicells NOVA 430H. In the bottom left you can see that with these initial settings, we will receive 6,238.26 $MOBILE tokens per day or at the time of writing $19.96 per day ($598.87 per month).

Not bad… but given the height and location of this deployment I think we can do better.

The first adjustment I am going to test is to adjust the elevation to 0°, so the antenna will be horizontal instead of angled downward. This should increase our area of coverage. For 98% of deployments, I suggest you use an elevation of 0°.

Results #2: As you can see below this slight adjustment to elevation has increased our $MOBILE per day to 8,714.17 or at the time of writing $27.89 per day ($836.56 per month).

This is a nice improvement but I think we can do even better! The direction the antenna points (Azimuth) has lots of large buildings in the way. Let’s adjust the azimuth to see if we can improve the coverage. His balcony has a 180° view of the surrounding area so there is lots of room for trialing different angles.

Results #3: After testing out 5+ different Azimuths I was able to find the optimal angle of 200° which is South-West. At this Azimuth, we drastically increase our rewards to a whopping 35,438.23 $MOBILE tokens per day or at the time of writing $113.40 per day ($3,402 per month).

Now we are talking! With a setup like this, we are now looking at less than ~1 month ROI on the hardware cost. I hope this example shows you the importance of proper planning and testing out multiple locations with multiple settings. Focus on deployment locations that provide optimal coverage to large areas with lots of people.

Once you’ve got your daily $MOBILE rewards estimate, it’s time to crunch some numbers with our Helium Moble/5G Calculator.