Twelve states from the driver's seat

My job title is RF engineer. I supervise field testers across the United States. That sounds contained on paper, and in practice it means I live out of a suitcase, a rental SUV, and whichever hotel is closest to the market we are testing.

We work about a 250 mile radius from wherever we set up. Test the network, find where the coverage falls over, hand back something the carrier can act on. Then pack the truck and do it somewhere else.

Twelve states so far. This is what that actually looks like.

California, where I learned the rhythm

Los Angeles first. LA never feels like one city. It feels like fifteen stitched together by freeways. We were stationed near Inglewood running the corridors between LAX and downtown. You can be eating breakfast in East LA and taking a reading in the Hollywood Hills by lunch, and both of those are the same working day.

San Francisco was harder. The hills will test your patience in an SUV loaded with equipment, and we worked the Financial District, the Mission, out toward the Presidio. One evening after a long shift I drove to Baker Beach and sat there while the fog came in under the bridge. No readings, no laptop. That was the first time the job felt like something other than work.

San Bernardino taught me more about propagation than any course has. You go from suburban sprawl to dense pine forest inside twenty minutes, and the elevation does things to a signal that a textbook describes but does not prepare you for. Agoura Hills was the same lesson with tighter roads and a full size Tahoe.

By the time we pushed east I had the pattern. Load the truck, read the city, do the work, find one quiet half hour, sleep, repeat.

Nevada after dark

Everybody thinks Vegas. We were there, but the Nevada I remember is the one past the strip. The mountains east of Reno. The high desert running out toward Elko. Emptiness that makes you feel small in a way that is not unpleasant.

Driving it at night is the part I would tell someone about. The road disappears, the stars come out properly, and you have two hundred miles of nothing to think in. During the day that emptiness can feel like isolation. After dark it stops feeling like anything at all, which is its own kind of rest.

The Dakotas, where I stopped being surprised

South Dakota caught me off guard. I was not expecting much and then the Badlands drop away in front of you into canyons and spires that look like the wrong planet. We tested near Rapid City. I drove out to Mount Rushmore on a day off and the thing nobody mentions is how quiet it is standing there.

North Dakota is grassland and wind. Mostly wind. We worked around Bismarck and Fargo, and I got out to Theodore Roosevelt National Park to see the wild horses. Flat terrain makes for clean propagation, so the work was some of the easiest of the year and the scenery was some of the best.

Minnesota, and the people who brought coffee

Minneapolis is a proper city. Good food, good coffee, and the lakes that locals run around whatever the weather is doing. We spent a solid stretch on the Twin Cities metro. Saint Paul has an older feel to it, the cathedral up on the hill, quieter streets.

Minnesotans are friendly in a way I did not expect and could not fake. People saw the equipment, asked what we were doing, and came back with coffee. One man spent ten minutes telling me where to eat lunch and was completely correct. When you are a long way from home and living in a hotel, that lands harder than it should.

Chicago, the hardest place to get a clean reading

Dense cities are the worst environment for this work, and Chicago is dense. Buildings bounce a signal around until you get dead zones and interference patterns that take real care to map. We were there for weeks, in the city and out into the suburbs, and my team put in long days for it.

The city paid us back. I walked the Magnificent Mile on a day off, ate deep dish at Lou Malnati's, which is the correct choice, and stood at the edge of Lake Michigan feeling like I was looking at an ocean. Late jazz in the South Loop. The L rattling overhead while you are trying to hold a reading steady.

Six states that run together in the telling

Ohio, Michigan, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Not because they blur, but because the pace was the same in all of them.

Columbus and Cleveland in Ohio. I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame expecting an hour and left after two. Detroit had the feel of a city rebuilding on top of its own wounds rather than pretending they were not there. The best Middle Eastern food I have eaten anywhere was in Dearborn, at a small place where the owner came out to ask if the meal had been good like the answer mattered to him.

Nebraska is corn, sky, and the most serious thunderstorms I have watched from a hotel car park. Lightning splitting the horizon in three directions at once. Iowa was quieter and Des Moines had more going on downtown than I expected. Wisconsin gave me Milwaukee's lakefront and cheese curds that have ruined every other cheese curd for me. Pennsylvania was Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell, a cheesesteak from Pat's, and the green hills of Amish country on the drive out.

Hotels, rentals, and the points that pile up

The logistics are half the job and nobody writes about them.

Hotels stop being hotels and start being where you live. I have stayed in more Marriotts, Hiltons and Holiday Inns than I can count. You learn which chains have the better pillows and which have breakfast worth getting up for. The points stack fast enough that there was a stretch where I did not pay for a night at all.

Rental cars are the same story. Ford Explorers, Chevy Tahoes, the occasional Grand Cherokee. Hauling test equipment across state lines means you need space and something that will start every morning without a conversation. I got bumped to a Navigator for two weeks once and enjoyed it more than I would admit in person.

Then the flights. Enough miles between deployments that I rarely pay full price, and PreCheck stopped being a convenience somewhere around the second year. You learn which airports feed you properly past security and which ones will eat your connection.

The part that costs something

For all of that, there is a bill, and it does not arrive as a rewards statement.

Being away is hard in a quiet way rather than a dramatic one. It is missing a school play because you are in Fargo. It is a video call from a car park in Cleveland because that was the only window the schedules gave you. It is being home for a holiday and still half on the road in your head, and some years not being home for it at all.

You miss birthdays and anniversaries, and worse than those, the ordinary Tuesday evenings that are actually what a family is made of. No amount of points covers that. The guilt is quiet and it travels with you.

What I can control is the time I do get. Phone down, email closed, no just checking one thing. When I am home I am home. I am still working at it, and I am better at it than I was, and the people who put up with this deserve more than whatever the road leaves over.

Why I have not stopped

People ask why I do not find something stationary. A desk. Something local. It is a fair question.

The honest answer is that the work suits me. I can run the team from a hotel when I need to, but I would rather be in the field solving the problem than reading about it afterwards. I like seeing the country at ground level. I like the crew I do it with, the way we arrive somewhere new, work it out, finish, and move on. There is a competence to that which feels earned rather than claimed.

So if you pass an SUV on a highway shoulder with antennas on the roof and someone in a safety vest squinting at a laptop, that might be me. Wave. I will wave back, and then I will get back to it, because the next market is already on the schedule.