As far as I know, at this point, we are just buying an NFT and attaching that to a console to be eligible for that initial airdrop. After TGE, nodes will become active and then we can install them on our small machines (by the requirements in documentation, and on HD requirements are low) and recieve rewards on them.
It is written down in Nubila documentation that Nodes will not yield rewards until we are on mainnet.
