Author: Tom

Large parts of the Helium LoRaWAN network consists of hotspots spoofing their location and earning HNT via Proof-of-Coverage while actually not providing any real world coverage for genuine data traffic. This is well known, Helium/NOVA claims to be fixing it

Out of the 100s of Helium hotspots shown in Hong Kong on Helium Explorer, i have so far been able to confirm 20 real ones, by going around the city with a mapping device (see part 1 for details). Today

As far as i can tell, the Dragino LPS8 is very poorly designed for heat dissipation; with the ambient air at around 25 degrees Celsius the device overheats and reboots frequently. I have added a cooling fan to the front

I thought it would be a good experiment to install a few sensors in my neighborhood monitoring the water level in several streams. As i live near the sea, i expect them to show the tide coming in, and also

While the denylist has grow to 41,544 known fake hotspots in its latest version of 22 Feb 2022, the Helium location spoofing scam continues. After the previous 100 fake hotspots moved their location from Lantau island to the Philippines early

Looking for real Helium hotspots in Hong Kong, i started to wonder how much real data traffic the Helium network is seeing around the world. With a simple script accessing the Helium blockchain API i found out that out of

The Helium Explorer is mainly a tool for HNT miners, due to widespread location spoofing it does not show real network coverage (see previous posts and denylist). So in order to understand the real network coverage, i built a GPS

As shown before, much of the blockchain-powered Helium LoRaWAN network is fake, especially in Hong Kong. Scammers claim their hotspots are installed in these locations to earn HNT while in reality they are probably somewhere in a garage, not providing

How it seems that where I happen to live, none of this network is real.. The Helium network has been growing extremely fast. I had checked coverage on my island of Lantau, Hong Kong in early Dec 2021 and only

With my indoor gateway, a basic Dragino LPS8, i was able to receive packets from over 500 meters distance, with the standard indoor antenna and the gateway positioned near a window about 10m above ground. I read on the TTN