The 7 Best Helium Miners in 2022 (Reults from testing 20+ models)

Choosing a Helium miner is difficult. We've all heard stories of people who suffered year-long shipping delays and missed out on the lucrative rewards of being an early to Helium mining. In 2022, Helium mania has died down but miners with clever placements are still profitable. It's much easier to get your Helium miners on time, but the question is the same as ever: What's the best Helium miner?

To save you the time, our team has looked into the data available and drawn from our experiences mining throughout the last year.

TLDR: Our top choice is the Sensecap M1 Helium Hotspot miner thanks to its great build quality, reputation for reliability, and consistent shipping times.

How do you mine Helium?

You mine Helium ($HNT) by placing a hotspot device on your windowsill and connecting it to wifi and power. It's that simple.

The hotspot provides wireless network coverage for millions of devices around you. The Helium network rewards you in $HNT for providing network coverage. It consumes a minimal amount of power - typically less than 5W. Unlike other crypto miners, it is quiet and you could place it in an office setting without detection!

What should I look for in a Helium Miner?

Every miner on this list is HIP-19 approved - the Helium community itself must vote to approve the manufacturer.

Note that unlike other cryptocurrencies, Helium mining power is not based on hashing power provided to the network. Instead, the more coverage you provide, the more Helium you earn.

No Helium miner is more “powerful” than another. This means the most important buying considerations are:

• Shipping speed. In this space, buyers biggest complaints are not getting their miners for MONTHS.
• Antenna quality. What antenna does it come with? What antenna will maximize your profits?
• Build quality. How durable is the hotspot build and design? Most likely your hotspot will be indoors, but how will you protect it if placed outside?
• Correct Frequency.

The 7 Best Helium miners in 2022

This was our team's second Helium miner purchase - and we bought it because we were told our Bobcat miners would take more than 5 months to get to use! We're glad with did. Of all the miners we've tried, the SenseCAP M1 is the best miner for your money.

It comes with the best dashboard for watching your deployment. This is a godsend if you have multiple miners in multiple locations. Even if you only have one miner, it is useful for checking uptime.

SenseCAP's dashboard looks and feels great

Make sure you get the correct frequency. The miner comes with a 2.8 dBi antenna for the EU868 band version and a 2.6 dBi antenna for the US915 band version.

The interesting thing about the SenseCAP M1 is its cooling method. It has a heatsink and a cooling fan inside of its enclosure. This ensures temperature regulation in different environments. This also means that unlike other miners which are silent, the SenseCAP M1 makes noise.

We recommend upgrading from the stock antenna to a high quality Helium antenna. The name of the game is to get the antenna as high as possible - and remember that doesn't necessary mean the bigger the antenna the better!

Reports of current shipping times put it under a month.

The MNTD Helium miner works well and looks great. The build quality is excellent. It's very compact, which helps a lot if you're trying outside placement or putting it in a high spot.

MNTD is a brand created by RAKwireless (RAK), a longtime creator of IoT and LoRa products. RAK sells them straight from the MNTD website - miners buy up drops immediately. To have a chance, make sure to sign up for the newsletter.

If you manage to get a drop - you will get the device fast! This is great compared to other brands which have months of delays. There is a Gold model and a Black model. The Gold model is more expensive and has 8GB of RAM, opposed to 4GB for the Black model.

The Bobber 500 is Bobcat's foray into the upcoming Helium 5G data offloading space.

This product is not an upgrade over the Bobcat miner 300.

It is a dual purpose miner, capable of providing both traditional Helium LoRaWAN coverage to mine the upcoming IOT token (currently HNT) as well as Helium 5G/CBRS coverage to mine the upcoming MOBILE token.

Feel like you missed out on HNT?

This is the time to get into a new coin on the ground floor. The Bobber 500 is a Full Hotspot that is also capable of running Helium's new Light Hotspot software.

Bobcat is known for shipping delays and backorders. On average it takes 6 months or more to receive your miner.

The Linxdot miner is notable for having an instant sync feature. It will sync with the Helium network within 30 minutes of activation, which is significantly fast than the sync times of other miners.

Apart from its Helium miners, Pycom has a reputation for producing affordable, quality LoRa products. It

Pycom has plans to launch further batches of this initial Full Hotspot Miner as well as launch of a Lite Hotspot late 2022.

The X2 is the follow up to the panther X1. The X1 was known to have issues with syncing, and we were glad to find these issues have been fixed in the X2. The design is great, however the stock antenna could be better.

Panther supports cryptocurrency payments through Coinbase commerce.

We deployed our Heltec miner with a couple of other miners in the same hex and were pleasantly surprised by the results. Our Heltec was easy to set up and is still running in the background.

It installed perfectly with no issues, and synced with no issues.

We would recommend replacing the stock antenna. It is reported to be 3.5dbi but does not perform as well as other 3.5dbi we have used.

Brands to Avoid:

Nebra Helium Miner

Nebra has poor customer service and extremely problems with delayed shipments. They are known for having the longest delays of any Helium brand, and that's saying a lot. Many miners have reported better results canceling their orders from Nebra and buying from resellers.

Conclusion

We recommend the SenseCAP M1.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I maximize my Helium profitability?

The rule of thumb is to place your antenna as high as possible. Beyond that there's a lot more to maximizing profitability than just trying to get a bigger antenna. You have to find the antenna that's best suited to the area that you live in.

What is the dBi in the stock Antenna of the MNTD?

2.3 dbi