| There are two types
- Those that specialise in climbing
- Those that specialise in the equipment.
So it depends which you want to be.
Usually if you are the equipment or radio specialist, you are telling the climbers to take an antenna and position it on the tower pointing to X. And they do the hard work.
You program all the equipment to do what is needed.
You will be in a corporate environment with strict guidelines, budgets and personal accountability.
Most cellular work is scheduled. You work in a small team of maybe two or three people with the odd job where you can be sent to look at something yourself.
If a company is expanding, you will be getting instructions from the planning engineers to take a kitset containing the towers, cabinets and equipment and set it up at a site that has been pre-organised with the land owner. A project manager will organise the power to be installed and various other external things. You simply send up the climbers to install the antennas and run the RF pipes or antenna cables down to the cabinet at the bottom of the tower and you install the equipment and make it talk with the rest of the network.
If there is an emergency you could be sent out by yourself to repair something. Usually it could be rebooting a radio in the cabinet or repairing a cable. If you have to do any climbing, a team will be sent.
Cellphone networks are all monitored and controled from a central location. You may find because of this, you are only doing some very basic initial programming, and the rest is handled from the head office and monitoring control centre. |
