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Ride Along With a Real Verizon Wireless Tester
jonknee writes "So you're probably sick of the Can you hear me now? ads, but here's a new article about a real-life Verizon Wireless network tester. This guy logs over 3,000 miles a month in a station wagon decked out with over a quarter-million dollars worth of network gear (I dare say the most valuable station wagon ever?). An audio file is linked at the bottom of the article that has a few minute sample of the audio Verizon tests with. It's bizarre!"
I can see where my nextel drops me everyday on the way home on 275 talking to my wife. Seriously.
/me calls verizon.
I used to work at Motorola and we would, at times, have to bring an entire debugging setup out in the field. A van, with the phone test board, workstation, and logic analyzer all hooked up.
A friend of mine does the same thing, except he works for Nextel. Needless to say, the job is quite boring.
They've put up a shitload more antennas. It's interesting that people haven't noticed, because they've been camoflauged.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
It seems like a lifetime ago, but I guess it was only about 11 or so years ago, I worked for a wireless engineering consultant firm in Arlington, VA. Among our many projects, one of the biggest during my time there was designing and building out the first Sprint PCS systems in DC, Seattle, and Portland.
We didn't own the vans we did drive testing in (the process of checking the signal by driving around with special equipment and software). We rented them. That was fun. We'd rent a nice brand new minivan from Budget or some car rental place and the first thing we'd do is rip out the dash board so we could run power cables to the alternator (I assume that's where they were plugging in. I dealt more with the software side).
In addition to some fairly expensive equipment, some of which our company designed, we also had specially modded PCS phones that, with a serial cable, would provide signal strength and other information to the computers.
We'd have maybe 3 or 4 laptops, each with a phone and GPS attached, and then we'd just go cruising around town recording signal strength, intereference measurements, and so on.
And if it wasn't just plain old geeky fun, the young engineers involved were simply a great group of people and we had a blast doing it together. And somehow we usually managed to get the minivans put back together well enough that we never got sued.
Thanks for the memories. I haven't thought about the old drive testing days in quite some time.
FFS, *somebody* buy the slashdot editors a copy of StyleWriter.
:)
Ha, I know this is off-topic, but I find it hilarious that their site has an example image of a document that's been "fixed" by StyleWriter. One of the sentences has been corrected to "I assume you'll dealing this soon..." Are you sure the slashdot editors don't already have a copy?