I thought it might be useful to describe the events of what a typical assignment is like for a traveling wireless engineer. The job is very similar to just administering one wireless network, but my job is more to assess or troubleshoot, than configuration and maintenance. My hope is that anyone coming up in the ranks or thinking about a traveling gig would have some anecdotal information to consider for themselves. This in no way is meant to suggest that a traveling job is harder, in my case, it is the exact opposite. My job is to assess existing wireless systems for all the ingredients to make a voice widget work while roaming and provide an excellent experience for the end users; that's it. I don't have to un-box equipment, stage, label configure, climb ladders, install, and fine tune anything. I have been doing that for the first 20 years, the last five have been pretty sweet, I have to admit.
Aside from the meetings, emails, and phone calls that need to occur to just get all the concerned parties involved to agree on a place, time, and scope of work, this writing will illustrate the actual weekly machinations of a traveling event and the work conducted during the week. This case will just be a small facility that can be conducted in the course of three days, since Monday and Friday are travel days, only one trip is required.
My equipment consists of an Ekahau Sidekick, two laptops (one for meetings, email, Wireshark analysis, and report writing, and the other for Ekahau and Omnipeek data gathering). I carry eight Netgear AC 1200 adapters for roaming analysis, and assortment of plugs, batteries, assorted gizintas and gozontas (this gizinta this, and that gozonta that... 😀) I have managed to whittle down everything I need to fit in a backpack, with the exception of my over the shoulder laptop desk I use when conducting roaming analysis.
Let's fast forward to the Monday morning travel day, reservations and tickets were made at an earlier date. Sometimes that date was a few weeks ago and sometimes it was a few hours ago. I like to travel in the mornings because if there are any flight delays, I have the time to fix it. If you leave the house at 5pm, that limits your ability to deal with any flight delays or cancellations and still be on site the next morning. It's a preference really, but my preference is to always be on site on time, which is 15 minutes early.
Get to the airport and park the car, drag all my gear and suitcase to the check in desk. I do check an actual suitcase, because it contains some items that do not fit in my backpack, and I always pack extra clothes because anything can happen and I like to make sure I have clothing for the weather or even a second location if I get diverted to a Defcon 12 event somewhere else. I like to get to the airport early so I have time to check email, or other admin tasks, before the flight. TSA Pre-check is a must have, non negotiable. I have too many electronic bits to have to explain to the airport federales. The Skyclub is a perfect place to sit and chill and avoid the Great Unwashed down at the gate, with snacks, reliable Wi-Fi and relatively clean bathrooms. I get there early enough that any lavatory activity is conducted on the ground, since I would rather be eaten by a shark, slowly, than walk into that airplane bathroom.
Every so often I will work on the plane, but more often than not you will find me napping, particularly short flights.
Arrive at the third airport of the day, (since I live in Florida, almost every flight has a connection somewhere) grab the luggage, pick up the car head to the hotel; depending on how long the trip was, I'm either ready for lunch or dinner. Eventually, I arrive into my hotel room and if all went well, I didn't have to go back to the desk to complain about anything. I immediately unpack all my gear to plug it in - which it already was before I packed it up but my ADHD prevents me from ignoring this step. I turn everything on to make sure it works, I enter any floorplans into Ekahau if they haven't been already and set up the parameters of the project. I check emails, work on any existing assessment reports if I need to and call my wife to chat about our respective day and check in with each other. She is a saint for putting up with all the travel, but maintaining that connection when I am away is crucial.
Get up Tuesday and get ready to drive to the site, hopefully, the information I have been given is correct. It doesn't happen often but it has happened: either its the wrong facility, they have no idea I'm supposed to be there, or my contact isn't there yet and I have to wait. Meeting the contact usually for the first time can go either way, depending on the gravity of the situation. Usually, they are pleasant and happy I'm there, sometimes not so much. There is a bit of conversation, hand shaking, explaining what I'm doing and what I'll need (if that wasn't properly communicated the first ten times). I begin by unpacking and spreading out all my gear someplace where I am not bothering anyone and I get set up to walk the facility if this trip is an assessment. If I have been sent to troubleshoot, I immediately get to work attempting to observe the issue.
I am good for a little over 100k sq ft a day, I don't like to work 12 hour days like I used to, since my accelerated decrepitude forces me to take a few minutes every so often. The entire time I am walking, I have a voice device in my ear and I am listening for any issues like choppy or dropped audio. I am looking for primary and secondary coverage on the heat maps, co-channel interference, checking the device configurations against the wireless configurations to ensure they are symmetrical. I am watching the built in wifi meter in the device to see what it is doing or not doing. I make myself notes as to the radio MAC addresses of the test devices in use, the firmware they are using and the server firmware and any other information that will end up in the assessment report. I check for essential functionality, one of which requires broadcast traffic to be able to be transmitted and received. the other of which is making an actual voice call. Every facility is different, which is what I enjoy most about my job. The ability to walk into a system I have never touched and be able to make recommendations based on the data from the assessment I conducted is... pretty cool.
The most important thing I bring to this job is not my skill set, it is my ability to pay attention and ascertain the room around me. In hospital environments, there are many things that require your undivided attention:
- Do not wander into Nuclear Medicine before you announce your intent and ask whoever is in charge if they currently have patients - in Nuclear Medicine, the patients are radioactive.
- Do not wander into an open case in an Operating Suite, or break the tape on the door where they do hip replacements. Hopefully, that one is obvious.
- Do not wander into an OR with the ultraviolet light on. That light is killing everything in that room. (Nowadays, the UV light is built into the house lights and merely opening the door will switch to the house lights, but in the old days, there was an R2D2-looking robot that was placed in the center of the room on a timer. You don't know which hospitals are still in the old days)
- Do not wander onto the oncology floor without checking in and letting them take your temperature. Your cooties will kill the patients that have no immune system.
- Pay attention to the placards outside of patient rooms, either your cooties can kill them or theirs will kill you. Never walk onto a floor and not let someone know you are there, make friends first, they will come in handy.
- Always remember that nobody who is in the hospital is having a good day. You are there to do a job but you need you need to understand things from the patients point of view. If Uncle Bob just passed away and is still laying there with a tube in his throat and the family is crying around his body, you can skip that room for a minute.
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