Finally I’ve had confirmation my 3 Bobcat 300’s will be arriving tomorrow. It’s been a 7 month wait and I’ve just paid the import fee’s.
I live in a small town and have been checking the amount of miners in my area and there are still very few. It’s a semi rural area and I will be installing a 6db aerial up a 20”” pole on my property which I’m hoping will communicate with not just miners in local villages, but also across the River Severn to miners in the city of Bristol where the miners are quite condensed in parts. I hope to use the other two Bobcats at a friend who lives the other side of town and another friend who lives high up in the countryside that looks across the Bristol Channel. I have seen another miner nearby to him who easily gets across to Bristol and local villages.
It should all be good fun and l’m really looking forward to being part of the helium network. It will be good to put all he theory I’ve read into practice. I shall write back with my findings when they have been live for a few weeks.
So my Bobcats arrive and I fired 1 up using the stock aerial. It took sometime to synch up, but I stayed patient until it did. I managed to setup port forwarding do the unit relayed as it should. It’s been running for a month with nothing to show. I already had a 6db tuned aerial from McGill in the uk and poles to mount it too. I went overboard on the quality of the cable because it was looking at around 11m in total and I didn’t wish anymore inherent losses than were necessary.
Yesterday I connected the Bobcat up directly to my router with an Ethernet cable and allowed the unit to synch. I live in a bungalow so have no upper level disabling me from getting the stock aerial any higher. Also the area I live in has a very hilly topology in every direct, so I had that to content with. I chose the 6b aerial because I never wished to go too high and miss out on possible witnesses.
Checked Helium explorer later and yippee, it’s now witnessing other hotspots with 1 being some 37km away. I will continue with this setup for the time being. Also I will also deploy the other two locally at friends houses so it will be interesting to see how things go.
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