About Gristle King

Hi, I'm Nik Hawks. Around September of 2020 I discovered Helium after a SAR experience in Nevada had me looking for technology to find lost paragliders. As many have been, I was quickly enthralled and spent the rest of 2020 building and deploying DIY hotspots.

I gathered most of what I'd learned from more or less 3 straight months of reading, doing, mistaking, and fixing Helium hotspot deployments and wrote the Rough Guide, at first just to help friends and family understand what it was that had gripped me so hard. It got picked up by many in the Helium community as the go-to resource for figuring out how to deploy hotspots optimally.

I started getting lots of emails and contact requests for help with deploying other people's hotspots or thinking about how to actually use the Helium network.

I built a small consulting business helping people understand LoRaWAN and ran that for a few years, eventually starting the only podcast focused on LoRaWAN.

As I got further and further into the world of geeks, engineers, nerds, and other makers and builders I began to build the confidence to start and run my own projects.

I have no formal training, relying on an enthusiasm that has been compared to a cattle-dog (RIP my lil' Birdie) and a general belief that we live in an extraordinary era where anything is possible if you're willing to read, pick up a wrench, and be wrong a lot.