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Wireless Site Survey

Measuring coverage on site rather than predicting it from a floor plan — including a countywide drive test in the era before the software existed.

Also known as Ekahau, Heat Mapping, Drive Test

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 13 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

The survey methodology the practice used for diagnosing RF problems was written here and then walked with — writing the procedure and then working the sites against it is how the procedure got good. It was applied across Flagler Hospital, Baptist Health, Georgia-Pacific and Kerzner International.

Surveys done on site with Ekahau across hospital estates — Baptist Health, Nemours, Flagler — because clinical wireless has to hold in stairwells, lift shafts and shielded imaging suites, which a floor plan will not tell you.

The same approach at Fort Stewart, and on plant floors at Nissan and Georgia-Pacific with the lines running.

Before the tooling existed, the long way: the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office countywide survey was done by driving the county, recording measured signal strength point after point, and building the coverage heat maps in AutoCAD’s survey tools from the readings.

Applied in

  • Library Wireless Program2006–2023From reported dead spots to an engineered coverage program, on an estate where the wireless carried staff safety devices.
  • Union Rome Water Treatment Plant Inspection and System Design2022–2023Drone-assisted survey, thermal imaging and coverage assessment across 32 sites along the Ohio River, ending in a design package specified down to the part.
  • Public Access Wireless Program2005–2019Fourteen years and four program names — JaxWiz, municipal Wi-Fi, public wireless, Downtown Wi-Fi — from inheriting somebody else's pilot to a signed, mapped downtown build still being extended four years later.
  • One Spark Festival Wireless2013–2015Forty-two access points in downtown traffic signal cabinets, backhauled over the fiber that runs the lights, with Ubiquiti mesh between intersections as the fallback and a tenfold internet burst for the week.
  • St. James Building Wireless2014–2015Building-wide wireless for City Hall, specified as a measurable coverage floor with heat maps as acceptance and the remediation cost carried by whoever promised the number.
  • Super Bowl XXXIX Stadium Wireless2004–2005Ticketing and access control across seven stadium gates for the 2005 Super Bowl, backhauled over six point-to-point bridge pairs, in the most hostile radio environment there is.
  • Fort Stewart Mobile Disaster Recovery Fleet2003–2004A fleet of vehicles able to deploy across Georgia during disasters and operate where fixed infrastructure was gone.
  • Hospital Network and Clinical Wireless2000–2004Facility-wide clinical wireless under HIPAA across hospital systems in New York, Florida, Delaware and North Carolina.
  • Nissan and Georgia-Pacific Industrial Wireless2001–2004Plant-floor, material handling, yard and warehouse coverage surveyed on site with the lines running.
  • Kerzner International Resort PMS Integration2001–2004Guest internet and marina shore power authenticated, metered and posted to a room account across resort properties.
  • Nassau County Sheriff's Office Countywide Wireless2001–2003Multi-tower public safety wireless across a large rural county, surveyed by driving it and plotting the readings by hand.

Career

See also

Also searched as

  • WLAN
  • enterprise Wi-Fi
  • wireless LAN
  • RF site survey
  • heat map
  • predictive survey