The business of conducting assessments is not very glamorous, contrary to popular belief. It is pretty repetitive and there is a lot of walking, usually with a laptop in your hand and a Sidekick hanging off your hip. The sidekick is connected by a USB cable to the laptop and you will soon discover an immense hatred for chairs with arms and door handles.
When I am finished with the Ekahau portion of the assessment, I then kit out my laptop for the OmniPeek portion of the assessment where we capture over the air data between two devices. OmniPeek allows for multiple adapters to be used in a USB hub, I carry eight and then I have to tailor my roaming tests to an area that will not exceed the eight adapters. Sometimes the duration is shortened in dense deployments, but the idea is to capture the device roaming while you are listening to the call and identify any issues that need to be resolved. I like to periodically check and make sure I am collecting good data and if I happen to see anything blatantly obvious, I will make a note of it to investigate later.
Once all of that is collected, whether it takes one day or six weeks, the business of analyzing data begins and since I rarely get time at home to conduct that analysis, I am usually doing it back at the hotel. That analysis can be for this project or the last project but the work still needs to get done. I spend a lot of time making sure I have maximized the amount of time I have to get my work done - It's not like I'm on vacation out here.
Which is not to say I don't get out to see the sights, it's just not a priority. Except for the Napoleon Dynamite house... that was a priority. I do recommend that you get out and eat the food and see the sights if you have the time to do so. Part of the traveling experience is getting to see places you wouldn't normally get to see. Sometimes those places are amazing and sometimes those places are on top of a mountain in Pigknucle, AZ where the biggest store in town is Dollar General.
Once the analysis is done and the report is generated (thank you Ekahau), the finished report is checked for spelling and grammar before I submit it to my boss who the reads it and picks it apart. If I submit a report I can defend anything in it, so we may have a conversation where he wants something to read a little differently, or he may have a question about an item that I will the show him what was observed and how I came to that conclusion. Once he approves it, it gets saved as a pdf file and uploaded to the mothership where all projects are stored. I then send a copy to the project manager who distributes it to the client. Some time after that, a meeting will be scheduled where I will be explaining the report to the clients which include anyone involved in the project from clinical to technical as well as the project managers and technical people from our company as well. Keep in mind all these events happen on the road, I rarely have a week at the home office to get caught up, so schedules have to be consulted and if everyone can be in a meeting and my availability is conflicting with another project I am working, then I have to stop and make time to join the meeting. It usually all works out and worst case scenario, I can ask to be scheduled at home to get caught up.
I reserve Monday and Friday for travel, so whatever gets done must occur between Tuesday and Thursday. Saturday and Sunday I am home with my family. There are incredibly rare occasions where I will stay over the weekend, not so much to save the company airfare, but maybe I'm in San Francisco and I want to fly my wife out on Friday so we can drive up to Napa and spend the weekend. With all those skymiles and hotel points you are racking up, you can do things like that.
So at a high level, that's about it. One of the reasons I require a travel job is I like living in Florida, but working in Florida does not bring in the same money as working in New York City. I have a few things I am trying to accomplish and the arbitrage between what I earn and the cost of living is the reason I do this. Nobody wants to travel and I use that to my advantage.
The one downside is if you do not stay relevant in the industry by taking classes, earning certifications, watching podcasts and YouTube videos, your skills will become stale, because you aren't touching the newest gear or configuring controllers. I am currently working on that part now and I am discovering that I am really interested in Private 5G LANs... you never know.
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