From another thread, the actual application appears to be something called a "hike and fly race":
> The Global Rescue XRedRocks is a premiere hike and fly race in North America, organized in a similar way to the Eigertour, Vercofly and DolomitiSuperfly- multi-day hike and fly events that take participants into magnificent mountains to see what they’re made of when we pair back free-flight to it’s most raw and exciting form. Travel is only allowed by wing or on foot. There are no supporters. ...
I was at that race. It's hours away, in a different part of Utah, for 3 days in the fall. The trackers they used for the competition were rented from a completely separate company, and, I believe, use cell based technology. The link you posted is about one guy who used a novel technology in an unofficial capacity. The race organizer wasn't using it at all. I know the organizer.
They have nothing to do with this.
Paragliders already have a solution for tracking outside of competitions, and most carry it in the form of an inReach or Spot device. Ground station based location reporting is not reliable because we can travel 100s of kms in a day over wilderness. In fact, you were required to have satellite tracking as part of the competition, or to participate in the other flying events in Central Utah that week. The cell based trackers provide uniform location tracking for race scoring as a primary purpose, and real time updates as a secondary purpose when cell connections exist. The satellite trackers give you the '911' button.
As far as I can tell your link from these devices placed in Salt Lake to the XRedRocks race is that someone at the race played with similar technology on top of a mountain?
This is one thing I love about HN - hearing from people who are directly involved or familiar with something. Nothing burns brain cycles like an unsolved mystery!
There are some Helium nodes along the SLC foothills [1], though I'm not seeing many so remote or far from a road. Unclear if this displays history or only active nodes.
I was confused until I realised they meant "pare back". I thought they were trying to pair "back free-flight" to "it's most raw and exciting form", until I reparsed.
Definitely a helium miner in play here. Plenty of pics on reddit where people have built self-powered deployments, solar charges a battery inside, 4g for internet access, and mine away helium all day long. Was very profitable 14-24 months ago but HNT crypto price has plummeted and helium founders pretty much bet the same type of deployment could happen for 5g deployments which has pretty much been a disaster. 5g implementations require more $$$ equipment and pricey antennas, and a complex setup with a limited range.
The appeal of these helium miners was a very simple setup and low cost. I'd seen offers for people who work on cell towers in SLC to rent space for these miners. Plenty of places in the SLC that can reach a large % of the valley without having to go that high. I still have a single miner running in Vegas that has a 50km reach from a residential house with a single 5.8dbi antenna. Could easily put one on a hilltop but doubtful it would help. I highly doubt the cartel is invested in these, very low data throughput which why IoT devices are the target market.
> Was very profitable 14-24 months ago but HNT crypto price has plummeted and helium founders pretty much bet the same type of deployment could happen for 5g deployments which has pretty much been a disaster.
When I looked into it, very little of the Helium miner payouts were coming from people using the network. Most of the payouts were from the network minting HNT to reward node operators, which they then cashed out by selling HNT to people on exchanges.
The obvious problem is that this model only works as long as the speculative value of the HNT token remains high. Once the speculative demand for HNT disappears, getting actual cash in exchange for mining operations is going to become very hard. Supposedly the operators planned on having actual end users pay to use the network, but that demand has been minimal so far.
They also had some problems where people discovered how to game the system and extract a lot of the rewards without providing much actual coverage. I don't know if they overcame these or not.
Like most crypto things, being early to the speculative game was the only way to make money. I suspect a lot of late arrivals who haven't even received their backordered miners yet are going to be in for some losses.
I am mostly anti-crypto but I always thought the concept of Helium was cool. If the "price" was competitive with LTE-M and NB-IoT (I'm not sure if it was, maybe it is now?) what stopped people from using it?
I always assumed these helium miners were doing some weird radio data collection, IP obfuscation, or something. There has to be some incentive behind getting people to set up these radios everywhere.
Being paid in HNT crypto to run the device. With a $250 box and the HNT pricing around $15-$20 and on the rise, people were making thousands mining a 100+ coins a month deployed in a half decent location. The buying demand for these miners went through the roof and people were waiting 9-12 months to get one. Easy to buy one now but likely only to mine around 4 coins a month due to halving and price decline. HNT coin is around $1.70 right now.
I don't know how much they have changed the incentive structure lately, but the original goal was to build-out a large LoRa network and then transition it to have a business model based on customers buying access tokens and spending them as their packets get carried by the Helium network.
LoRa networks are not IP networks until the LoRa packets reach the internet edge and get backhauled to gateways that then deliver them to the owners of the data collected over LoRa. So anyone trying WiFi packet sniffing is barking up the wrong radio, and wrong layer 2.
Thing is, LoRa is not that big a business for commercial network operators, never mind oddball blockchain-based network operators. A lot of LoRa is deployed for a single purpose or application by the organization building both the sensors and the data collection network.
SLC's recreational trails manager says it might be related to cryptocurrency. This sounds like the Helium crypto network, which is an IoT network offering node owners payment in cryptocurrency, which has plummeted in value ($55.22 in Nov 2021, $1.73 today).
I disagree, this sounds _exactly_ like what the drug cartels have been doing in Mexico for years. They build their own network so they can bypass the government. It makes more sense that they are connecting their operations further up north given the amount of security upgrades that the USA has been doing recently.
One Example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-telecoms-cartels-s...
"Crypto" is just a buzzword that people who don't understand tech jump to as a kneejerk reaction.
The Mexican cartels use actual cell/mobile equipment, and have kidnapped engineers from South Texas to gain additional technical knowledge. Also, these areas surround SLC are not territory they're trying to control in the same way. What utility would there be in this network vs simply using encrypted communication over the internet?
On the other hand, solar powered mining with just good enough radios to do C2 and send back any hashes found would be an exact match to this scale of equipment.
These units are far too small and low-powered to be cartel cell towers. The towers they're building in Mexico are more or less normal towers, supplemented by COW trailers (larger units with generator+solar).
Cartels in CONUS are typically using regular cell and satellite phones. Ostensibly, the NSA and the various military "Activities" aren't paying attention to CONUS communications, unless it's near the border.
There isn't enough information in the article to reasonably tell what they're designed for. If someone wants to post actual photos of the hardware, that would be swell.
What does this provide that an encrypted cellphone messenger app does not? I'm sure they have the know how to acquire SIMs through intermediaries to remain anonymous. That's probably a lot less suspicious than setting up random radio towers, in fact this story is evidence of that.
Presumably self-operated infrastructure could expand comms to remote areas that don't normally have cell service. They makes sense in stretches of the southern border. But right outside salt lake city is covered by cell access.
What you say sounds possible and plausible, although I would not immediately discount crypto, as the Helium map does show some cells in unpopulated areas in the hills surrounding the SLC metro.
They should be able to eliminate Helium as the culprit if they're able to inspect what's in the box, as Helium needs a Helium-sanctioned box, from my understanding.
I would think that if it was organized crime, the feds would be all over it already. Even stuff like pirate radio gets tracked and shutdown fairly quickly. I'd imagine the FBI still has significant sigint ops, even if they might be less extensive than during the cold war.
If they keep popping up after these initial ones are taken down, I guess that's leads towards the idea of whoever is doing it has a big incentive to do it.
Would think that crypto would have too long a payback esp if the equipment keeps disappearing.
I may be stereotyping, but in my experience there is a strong ham community within the LDS Church. My first reaction was to assume something ham related, not drug cartel.
Which drug cartels are operating out of public lands in Utah? How did they get there? How has nobody noticed them? Why do drug cartels have interest in the snowy peaks of the SLC foothills of all places? Why are they just in the foothills and not checks notes all the way through Arizona to Mexico?
There would be no reason for cartels to establish parallel cellular networks in Salt Lake City of all places.. and these devices don't sound remotely like what the cartels were doing - you need backhaul to have a cell site - these are remote mesh wifi devices. All of the cartel ones are 'parasitic' where they use the actual cell site's hardware to provide a standalone antenna.
Weren't they at least installing their stuff on existing towers etc to make it less obvious? Planting big solar panels into the landscape must be the stupidest attempt at creating a secret cell network...
I don’t understand why the cartel would put these in such an obvious location. (But I also don’t understand why anyone would…)
They seem to be in obvious, high traffic areas. The one mentioned in the video is a short hike from the Utah capitol building. If you hike at all and live in salt lake, this is where you go. Especially in the winter. It seems like they were asking to be found.
It’s certainly less in the winter, but in the summer hundreds of people would hike or bike past this everyday.
You cannot power more than a femtocell with a solar panel, and these are too far out in wilderness with no wired backhaul to be a plausible mobile mobile network. In parts of Mexico you can take over a house and a power source to put up a real cell site.
The drug angle doesn't make much sense in Utah. This State trends towards prescription drug abuse [0] [1], and aggressively prosecutes drug offenses to the max. How could antennas be relevant?
Also, Helium payouts seem to be based on amount of clients in a zone, which would make this pretty pointless.
Helium hype really makes it difficult for other real IoT networks to operate also, like The Things Network, the operators of which do it for free (including myself). Why does everything have to be a moneymaker?
I have the same question. Seems like the crash hit them hard and last I heard they were rebasing (n.b., not using this in a technical meaning) on top of Solana.
I also heard a lot of rumors it was a pump/dump or pyramid type scheme, but I haven’t seen proof of that, only if premining (which is awfully scammy to be fair).
Anecdotally, rooftop telecom site operators, tower owners and WISPs have been approached by "helium" miner people for several years now, they're almost universally laughed at as a non plausible business plan and revenue source.
Somewhere in there is a gem of a good idea. Incentivize operators of a mesh network where you can buy credits to get data on the mesh. Like I can see the concept and in it's raw form it's exciting.
Helium though got way overpriced and insane with the crypto bubble.
Maybe they can rectify it and turn sane? I'd love a world where all this deployed helium hardware isn't trash.
I believe Helium does require internet access rather than just working as an offline relay. How's the 4G in those locations? The video shows only one antenna too.
It was a very well built setup that I assumed (as did everyone) that it was put there by the gov in some capacity, such as for weather observations. It wasn't hidden or hard to find by any means and on a fairly popular trail. I would bet during nice summer weather a few hundred people per week walked past it.
I betcha it's https://gristleking.com, he's been advocating for paragliders to use LoRaWAN for a tertiary emergency communications network (primary being Garmin's Iridium network, then cell or perhaps iOS 14's GPS SOS).
The idea is to have multiple means of calling for help + tracking location when free-flying.
I don't think iOS's SOS feature is feasible from a paraglider. You have to point it at a specific direction for a while to get a message out. An air band radio at 121.500 (emergency frequency) would make more sense (with the required permits of course)
InReach should work well though from a paraglider as a primary SOS.
From a paraglider: we are definitely paying attention to the new iphone SOS feature, many of us who fly over wilderness areas carry a spot or in-reach. We never activate in the air (no point), so having to point it in a specific direction is not an issue. Being blocked by limbs or terrain would be an issue.
Some people carry air-band radios, but largely we use the ham frequencies. Air band would be of limited utility for emergencies since we would just be using an aircraft as a relay to ATC to SAR. Satellite trackers have one button that does all of that without having to deal with air-band.
So he accomplishes it by covertly installing thousands of dollars of hardware on PUBLIC land and opening himself up to thousands more dollars in recovery fees? Not likely.
You can see where all the Helium hotspots are. They have a mechanism called Proof Of Coverage so that they can be used to tell devices communicating with them what their geolocation is. It's pretty easy to tell which devices are on top of the mountains over salt lake.
His setup looks remarkably similar to what the rangers took down and he's got several videos placing Helium miners or whatever they use on remote peaks in Utah.
I suspect the "authorities say it may be related to Crypto" line was just an expert couching their highly confident assessment as a CYA, but it seems to be obviously crypto.
The actual application appears to be tracking paragliders. Helium just provides the internet hotspot:
> Over the course of a week, supported by Tommy and Ryan at Lonestar Tracking, Matthew at Digital Matter, Travis at Helium, and Jeremy C (@jerm on Discord), I deployed 2 off-grid Helium Hotspots high in the mountains of Utah (one at over 8,000′ and one above 11,000′) to track 30+ paragliders as they flew during the annual Red Rocks Fly In as well as raced during the inaugural X Red Rocks Hike & Fly race.
This explains why somebody would want a hotspot in such a remote, high location.
> The task is to reach the control and turn-points defined by the Race Committee every day for three days as quickly as possible traveling only by paraglider or on foot.
I imagine you'd want good tracking data to get an idea of where you're going.
That seems plausible for that one specific setup - but it's obvious that all of these weird crypto grifters were trying to make money by deploying in remote spots with long range connections to capture the rewards.. there aren't very many paraglider canyons and there are far more of these in the foothills.
No -- in the news report the antennas were different, the solar panel was much larger, the unit was much more permanently attached to the mountain, and there were guylines supporting the unit from severe weather.
I’m a PhD student at the University of Utah, and I actually worked with the Flux Research Group last semester, who operate POWDER, and this isn’t them.
Hey Aston, good to see you on here. I agree this is not how Flux/POWDER operates, I do not see Alex going up the hill and placing equipment without approval...
so there isnt any chance, someone was a little presumptuous with placement of equipment, or is the expectation of vetted experimental procedure made certain?
.. this makes sense - except that project is well-known to the BLM and other folks. My brother is a ARC-GIS engineer for the BLM division and he confirmed the equipment in POWDER is registered with them, the state and the FTC.
this project has DOD involvement, it may be the case that someone is shy about it, because government project, or oops, i didnt realize anyone would care.
Readit News
> The Global Rescue XRedRocks is a premiere hike and fly race in North America, organized in a similar way to the Eigertour, Vercofly and DolomitiSuperfly- multi-day hike and fly events that take participants into magnificent mountains to see what they’re made of when we pair back free-flight to it’s most raw and exciting form. Travel is only allowed by wing or on foot. There are no supporters. ...
https://xredrocks.com
The devices appear to be internet hotspots, possibly powered by the Helium network:
https://gristleking.com/helium-deployed-the-network-in-actio...
This could explain why you'd want to put a hotspot at the top of a mountain: to provide real-time tracking of paragliders during the competition.
The hotspots in the local news clip could be put there either for real-time telemetry during the competition or for training.
They have nothing to do with this.
Paragliders already have a solution for tracking outside of competitions, and most carry it in the form of an inReach or Spot device. Ground station based location reporting is not reliable because we can travel 100s of kms in a day over wilderness. In fact, you were required to have satellite tracking as part of the competition, or to participate in the other flying events in Central Utah that week. The cell based trackers provide uniform location tracking for race scoring as a primary purpose, and real time updates as a secondary purpose when cell connections exist. The satellite trackers give you the '911' button.
As far as I can tell your link from these devices placed in Salt Lake to the XRedRocks race is that someone at the race played with similar technology on top of a mountain?
[1] https://explorer.helium.com/iot/hex/882696b829fffff
I was confused because I expected everybody past elementary school would know mountains are made of rocks ...
For people unfamiliar with the area, this is the Avenues Twin Peak, not very far above the fairly busy shoreline trail.
The appeal of these helium miners was a very simple setup and low cost. I'd seen offers for people who work on cell towers in SLC to rent space for these miners. Plenty of places in the SLC that can reach a large % of the valley without having to go that high. I still have a single miner running in Vegas that has a 50km reach from a residential house with a single 5.8dbi antenna. Could easily put one on a hilltop but doubtful it would help. I highly doubt the cartel is invested in these, very low data throughput which why IoT devices are the target market.
When I looked into it, very little of the Helium miner payouts were coming from people using the network. Most of the payouts were from the network minting HNT to reward node operators, which they then cashed out by selling HNT to people on exchanges.
The obvious problem is that this model only works as long as the speculative value of the HNT token remains high. Once the speculative demand for HNT disappears, getting actual cash in exchange for mining operations is going to become very hard. Supposedly the operators planned on having actual end users pay to use the network, but that demand has been minimal so far.
They also had some problems where people discovered how to game the system and extract a lot of the rewards without providing much actual coverage. I don't know if they overcame these or not.
Like most crypto things, being early to the speculative game was the only way to make money. I suspect a lot of late arrivals who haven't even received their backordered miners yet are going to be in for some losses.
I am mostly anti-crypto but I always thought the concept of Helium was cool. If the "price" was competitive with LTE-M and NB-IoT (I'm not sure if it was, maybe it is now?) what stopped people from using it?
LoRa networks are not IP networks until the LoRa packets reach the internet edge and get backhauled to gateways that then deliver them to the owners of the data collected over LoRa. So anyone trying WiFi packet sniffing is barking up the wrong radio, and wrong layer 2.
Thing is, LoRa is not that big a business for commercial network operators, never mind oddball blockchain-based network operators. A lot of LoRa is deployed for a single purpose or application by the organization building both the sensors and the data collection network.
"Crypto" is just a buzzword that people who don't understand tech jump to as a kneejerk reaction.
On the other hand, solar powered mining with just good enough radios to do C2 and send back any hashes found would be an exact match to this scale of equipment.
Cartels in CONUS are typically using regular cell and satellite phones. Ostensibly, the NSA and the various military "Activities" aren't paying attention to CONUS communications, unless it's near the border.
There isn't enough information in the article to reasonably tell what they're designed for. If someone wants to post actual photos of the hardware, that would be swell.
Presumably self-operated infrastructure could expand comms to remote areas that don't normally have cell service. They makes sense in stretches of the southern border. But right outside salt lake city is covered by cell access.
They should be able to eliminate Helium as the culprit if they're able to inspect what's in the box, as Helium needs a Helium-sanctioned box, from my understanding.
Very strange thing to say when the parent explained exactly why this could be crypto and why it's plausible. Do you know how Helium works?
Do a Google Image Search on "helium crypto solar power" and you will see many devices that look like that.
Would think that crypto would have too long a payback esp if the equipment keeps disappearing.
They seem to be in obvious, high traffic areas. The one mentioned in the video is a short hike from the Utah capitol building. If you hike at all and live in salt lake, this is where you go. Especially in the winter. It seems like they were asking to be found.
It’s certainly less in the winter, but in the summer hundreds of people would hike or bike past this everyday.
Deleted Comment
if you still have money tied up in crypto you can still try and sell it
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[0] https://www.deseret.com/2008/1/31/20067144/happy-valley-delv...
[1] https://imdb.com/title/tt1263682/
It's almost comical that, in this context, the term "legacy" is applicable for 1-year old nodes. Things change fast in the crypto world I guess!
Helium hype really makes it difficult for other real IoT networks to operate also, like The Things Network, the operators of which do it for free (including myself). Why does everything have to be a moneymaker?
I also heard a lot of rumors it was a pump/dump or pyramid type scheme, but I haven’t seen proof of that, only if premining (which is awfully scammy to be fair).
Anyone have better details?
Helium though got way overpriced and insane with the crypto bubble.
Maybe they can rectify it and turn sane? I'd love a world where all this deployed helium hardware isn't trash.
Didn't take me long to figure out it was Helium.
It was a very well built setup that I assumed (as did everyone) that it was put there by the gov in some capacity, such as for weather observations. It wasn't hidden or hard to find by any means and on a fairly popular trail. I would bet during nice summer weather a few hundred people per week walked past it.
The idea is to have multiple means of calling for help + tracking location when free-flying.
InReach should work well though from a paraglider as a primary SOS.
Some people carry air-band radios, but largely we use the ham frequencies. Air band would be of limited utility for emergencies since we would just be using an aircraft as a relay to ATC to SAR. Satellite trackers have one button that does all of that without having to deal with air-band.
A year ago, that may have meant significant earnings.
https://explorer.helium.com/coverage
https://explorer.helium.com/hotspots/11f1b3jVrJ9mh1KebQY5oVm...
https://gristleking.com/helium-deployed-the-network-in-actio...
His setup looks remarkably similar to what the rangers took down and he's got several videos placing Helium miners or whatever they use on remote peaks in Utah.
I suspect the "authorities say it may be related to Crypto" line was just an expert couching their highly confident assessment as a CYA, but it seems to be obviously crypto.
> Over the course of a week, supported by Tommy and Ryan at Lonestar Tracking, Matthew at Digital Matter, Travis at Helium, and Jeremy C (@jerm on Discord), I deployed 2 off-grid Helium Hotspots high in the mountains of Utah (one at over 8,000′ and one above 11,000′) to track 30+ paragliders as they flew during the annual Red Rocks Fly In as well as raced during the inaugural X Red Rocks Hike & Fly race.
This explains why somebody would want a hotspot in such a remote, high location.
The race itself is kind of wild:
https://xredrocks.com/
From the Rules page:
> The task is to reach the control and turn-points defined by the Race Committee every day for three days as quickly as possible traveling only by paraglider or on foot.
I imagine you'd want good tracking data to get an idea of where you're going.
https://twitter.com/DAnconia_Crypto/status/16110365997013688...
https://twitter.com/thegristleking/likes
Those are from something much different.
https://gristleking.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/big-anten...
https://gristleking.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Gristle-K...
It’s a cool project and I love the DIY aspect of something so technical, but don’t love the dumping it on public lands aspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Ydb0rJbFk
https://advancedwireless.org/salt-lake-city/#Map
https://powderwireless.net/
so there isnt any chance, someone was a little presumptuous with placement of equipment, or is the expectation of vetted experimental procedure made certain?
https://advancedwireless.org/new-2-7m-pawr-project-funded-by...
> 1 rooftop programmable massive MIMO array and multiple dedicated UE devices
> 6 base stations on light poles with multiple SDRs each – coming in late 2022
Interesting project, but there's no mountain location here and the antennas look more like 2m 1/2 wave from the video...
is it part of it, is it someone taking advantage of it, is it unrelated?