My tasks were as follows:

Seems simple. This project had one caveat: I’m surveying a paper mill.

Okay, I've surveyed warehouses and food manufacturing. What makes this different? Well, this was a whole different animal.

Rural New England-bound, I drove towards the site. I zoomed past highway signs with innumerable town names that outsiders mispronounce. Nestled amongst boarding schools that cost more annually than my lifetime education and certification spending, the paper mill emerged from the forest. Two century-old bricks adorned the exterior with a smattering of modern steel structures.

Not sure if you have this too, but sometimes I arrive on-site, see the exterior, and think “What in tarnation did I sign up for?”. Collecting my survey kit and bag, I braced myself for this adventure.

After getting settled, the survey process required help from the electrician for the forklift. On paper, it resembled other APoS surveys: raise the lift, walk around, lower the lift, move on to the next area. That seemed so until I met the glue kitchen.

A glue kitchen mixes glues used in paper product manufacturing. Any paper towel or cardboard comes from mixing the pulp and glue together to press the finished product into sheets. This is not your child’s Elmer’s glue. It STINKS so bad. I speed-walked to avoid dry-heaving. In the adjoining room, machines pressed the cardboard together; staff monitored this process from a control room opposite the machines. The other area smelled worse. This room still smelled moderately stinky, but felt oppressively humid in comparison; I could hardly see with my own glasses. Years and years of paper pulp caked the control room exterior so much one could hardly see out the windows.

On top of that, the electrician stayed in the scissor lift bucket where it was even more hot and humid; I now learned most lifts allow for raising the bucket without anyone inside. I'm not sure what happened there.

Fortunately, beyond the manufacturing areas, the facility mostly had storage spaces that had no smell. My adventures weren’t over though. Distinctly, I recall a dark area with wooden floors. I went to step into a section and heard shouts “No, no, no! Don’t go there.” Looking downward, the wooden floors had collapsed and a decently sized hole lay in front of me. In another area, my shoe hit a pile of soot and a cloud manifested in front of my face.

I went to the hotel flabbergasted that anyone chooses to work in a place like this every day for money. After a long shower, I crawled out for dinner at Korean restaurant nearby. The town fell silent at night. I was the only customer in the restaurant and could hear myself breathe. One night later, I went to a small grocery store for fun because that’s all there was to do there. Despite the grunge and cringe onsite, this yielded one of the most interesting surveys from a technical perspective.

This site I learned that paper has some unusual RF properties. When I surveyed an area with large, round bales of paper stacked on pallets, I discovered that the paper attenuated signal much more in 2.4 GHz than 5 GHz. Why that is from a physics perspective? I am not sure.

Nonetheless designing around these pallets posed an interesting challenge. I had to ensure that the areas with users has reasonable coverage even with the pallets moved around. Each pallet had product maybe 15’ high, casting an RF shadow in relation to the AP. They also had interesting devices such as machine and lighting sensors that showed up on the spectrum analyzer.

Industrial surveys aren’t for the faint of heart. If you find yourself in my shoes, here’s some practical advice to make your life easier:

So that’s the story of my stinkiest site. Hope one of you find it helpful or at least humorous.

Smell you later,
Eva