If you’ve followed the steps of making sure your Helium hotspot/miner has a fixed LAN IP/DHCP reservation on your local network at home AND you’ve set up port forwarding to forward incoming traffic on port 44158 on your home router to the Helium hotspot THEN it’s time to test whether it worked.
There are a number of free online services to test the port forwarding setup of your router/hotspot. Each of these services takes note of the public WAN IP address of your router, and then it sends a few packets of data to that IP address over the nominated port and checks to see if anything responds. If it does, then great, traffic has reached your hotspot and you’ve done everything correctly. If it doesn’t then you may have some more troubleshooting to do.
The one I use and recommend most often is Port Checker, but there are many others that do the same job like Can You See Me or You Get Signal.
What if it reports as Closed or otherwise NOT open?
One of several things could be the issue:
- Check to make sure your hotspot is on and correctly configured with a static LAN IP/DHCP lease reservation
- Check to make sure your port forwarding is set up correctly, and forwarding to the correct IP address in 1. above
- You may have set up port forwarding correctly, BUT you may be on a CGNAT (Carrier Grade Network Address Translation) service with your ISP. Read this post and maybe call your ISP and see if you can opt out of CGNAT.
…and if it shows it’s Open?
Great. Congratulations! You’ve done everything you need to do. Now sit back, exercise a LOT of patience, and wait for the Helium Explorer and Helium app to update. Note: this could take a week in some cases, so trust it has worked and resist the temptation to futz with it! 🙂
