Breathing Wi-Fi

I often get asked "What's with the velcro on your laptop?"

They are referring to this velcro:

Why the velcro, dude?

The answer is simple: I'm a Wi-Fi engineer.

You see, Wi-Fi engineers are not your typical run-of-the-mill network engineer. Sure, we carry the requisite rollover console cable, USB-to-Serial adapter, know most vendors' CLI interfaces through reflex alone, can whip up a discontiguous wildcard mask for an ACL without blinking an eye, and can diagnose spanning-tree problems in our sleep.

But unlike most other network engineers, we have a very intimate relationship with Layer 1. Whereas route/switch engineers have learned and long since forgotten about Ethernet's physical properties largely because they're not the source of many issues, Wi-Fi engineers eat, sleep, and breath air (you see what I did right there!) Wi-Fi engineers must know the ins-and-outs of RF propagation, signal strength, free space path loss, signal attenuation through various objects, channel planning, and the intricacies of co-channel interference in order to design a network that works.

This requires tools... Wi-Fi tools. Ask any Wi-Fi engineer and they'll show a plethora, nay a smorgasbord, of various WLAN adapters, antennas, and spectrum analyzers. We've all got too many to count; some Cardbus, some USB, some with internal antennas, some with external, some from companies that no longer exist, and some that have been obsolete so long that nobody else remembers them... except for us! Because there's always a chance we'll run into that one customer that still uses legacy equipment that we need to support, test, and emulate.

So when we roll into action, we light the place up!

Light it up!

So when you ask: "What's with the velcro, dude?"
I'll kindly reply: "I breath Wi-Fi, man!"

Breathing Wi-Fi

Until we Associate again!