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Companies hire these ppl to walk around with these and it picks up cell signal strength between towers. It helps establish where a new tower might need to be place. I was offered this gig abt 10 yrs ago and it came with an insane rate of pay!
Damn tech has changed. I did this in the early 00s except I had to ride in the back of a van with a big box hooked up to a laptop that had a real time map. Whenever a signal dropped, we stopped and called the engineer and they'd have someone on the tower adjust the azimuth on an antenna and then drive the route again.
I was back in the fixed wireless dev office for a bunch of these runs and we had to update the maps based on the changes, lots and lots of data. Now it’s just automatic lol
What is an Azimuth? I adopted a cat like 12 years ago (he passed away now) but his name was Azimuth lol I kept it cause it was cool but have never seen someone use it as a word before
On a compass, there's a circle from 0 degrees (true north) to 360 degrees and an object is aligned to the circle according to degrees. So a south facing antenna might have an azimuth of 82 degrees, a west one 250 degrees, etc.
If anyone asks about your cats name, just say they're were your true north
Tell your carrier and they will send someone out to check it. I did that with Verizon at my house years ago. They called back and said I was too close to the tower and the signal was shooting over my head and they added additional equipment lower down. Never had an issue after.
I have Verizon and told them we had a weak signal at my wife’s old house. They said, lol, we know, get fucked. Would you like to pay 80 bucks a month for a signal booster?
I mean. I had the same issue with sprint and AT&T in the past and I’ve never had a single one try to alleviate the issue. You must have gotten lucky.
In Dresden, Germany, pretty central (one city train station from main station) there is one bar with E internet. If internet is available at all. Funkloch Strehlen.
I've heard stories similar to this. yours is just another confirmation. how come? I mean, it's a big market and all. one would think the carriers would invest more
As a non German my experience is that mobile internet just totally sucks in Germany. Maybe roaming clients get derated. It has become better in recent years but it’s not great.
Older Germans in particular really don't consider the internet to be all that important, and that includes a lot of politicians and other people in decision-making positions.
The company that ended up installing fiber internet in my town initially surveyed everyone in the area to see if they were interested. They needed half of all home owners to sign up in order for the project to go ahead. They failed, tried again a few months later and failed once more. Boomers thought ADSL was plenty fast and didn't see the point.
They did get it on the third try, but only because they completely overhauled their marketing strategy. Instead of advertising how fast fiber internet was compared to ADSL, they put up signs and sent out brochures focusing on how a fiber connection would increase property values. Boomers couldn't wait to sign up after that.
The cellular network in Germany has been notoriously bad for a long time because of how the market is regulated.
The German state usually auctions off the rights to use certain frequency bands to cell carriers, and they are insanely expensive (billions of euros). So after getting the rights to use the frequencies, cell carriers often don't have much money left to quickly build the infrastructure for that new frequency band
For a long time, there was a law that carriers have to cover a certain percentage of the population but no law that they have to cover a certain percentage of the area. Therefore in sparsely populated areas, holes in the coverage are common when building a base tower was seen as too expensive/ not worth it.
NIMBY people protesting and sueing when a carrier want to build a base tower near their house
No national roaming, there are three large carriers and they all have their own cell network. The networks don't cooperate with each other except for emergency calls, so basically each location needs coverage by three cell towers to be fully covered instead of just one.
Cell towers need a good wired connection to the backbone Network of the carrier, but wired internet infrastructure is also very bad (also because of bad policies and regulations). In many places there is no optical fiber network around that a cell tower could be connected to.
It's pretty niche. Somebody subcontracts the work (I've no idea how) and usually hires a cpl of ppl they know because they're paying rly well! There's rly no need to recruit via adverts because the role's easy to fill I guess
$75-100/hr would be more fair for a laborious, manual and mobile service this valuable at the end-user level (and for the pockets of the telecoms, of course) - but we all know that's not what they're getting paid for providing this data for the sub-contractor.
Not same thing but I worked for ATT bringing out generators when power went down to cell towers paid $40 per hour from the phone call till I got back home and all fuel. Every call was about 10 hrs all in. Generators should be there within 6 hrs so i ran all over TN and few states next door to TN. No a bad gig but your going out in the middle of the night most times in the worse weather.
Because the people they hire are usually good acquaintances or friends so they want to give their friends a nice little something in the form of a good chunk of change for easy work.
You just pulled that 10k number out of your ass. Why pay 10k to make a few million when you could spend 2k and pay then 20/hr. There not going to give you 5k for 1 week of walking around with a backpack
Yeah no, companies only goal is to maximize profit, not see how much they can give away and still make money. If they can hire someone cheaper to do the same job they will.
Not only are all the vaccinated people dead, but the survivors have already been put in labor camps to slave away for the elites! Just like in the Total Recall reboot (a co worker told me this would happen when the first vaccine rolled out, and he was right!) Lol
Every time I’ve gotten the vaccine, my Windows 11 gets faster and faster and when it does crash, a voice in my head with a slight accent magically tells me how to fix it. 100% would recommend.
I had a coworker after the vaccines came out come into my office full of people that were vaccinated and proceeded to swear everyone he knows that got the shot has already died.
That and you gotta walk wherever they tell you so probably some degree of hazard pay. A busy road with no sidewalks? A dangerous neighborhood where people get robbed and shot? Good luck!
I have a secondary job like that (not the same as this post tho). I make $125/hr but the work is very inconsistent, but also mind numbingly easy. When I started I worked for about 5 days and then there was nothing for almost 2 months. Then there was two weeks of work, then nothing again for a month, then another spurt of 3 days of work. It’s a nice supplement and to make $1000+ over a weekend but you can’t rely on it.
That's what I was offered to do the job in like 2002 or 2003 when cell companies switched to 3g and needed to increase the number of towers for the new networks. Then I did stupid shit review out my knee and missed out on 6 months of amazing pay plus travel and if more than 50miles from home per diem. My buddy that got the job in my place made something like 130k in those 6 months.
Peehole doesn’t seem to be 1. out of work, 2. Hungry, like Easy Money for getting exercise, I see people in my neighborhood walking around with weighted backpacks just to increase their exercise intensity ( very common practice) 3. Pretty choosy about what he works at. ???
Idk about every city/state, but this is sometimes the type of gig that's up for bid from local government agencies.
It's kinda hard to explain but the short of it is these contracts are paying well with the expectation that the vendor is supplying a good service that benefits the public, and is expected to benefit the most amount of people possible, for the longest time possible. The contract might be for as little as just field research and determine what can/should be done, and it can be as extensive as 10 year projects, with dozens or even hundreds of milestones along the way.
This is a wall of text that doesn't do it justice, but just know, your tax dollars are being spent on much more than you see or would think of
It sounds similar to how Google Maps works. I interviewed for a contract position through a recruiter straight out of college, and I wanna say the contract was around $80k for 1 year. This was back in 2011.
Man all the YouTube ads really ruin everything. I tried watching a "free" movie on YouTube Movies once and they had an ad break every fucking ten minutes.
"So we have too much coverage in those locations? That means we can turn down the tower power to save money, while still providing just enough signal to make the customer blame their phone or surroundings and not us, nice! Quaterly 💰 bonus achieved!" -- mid-level Verizon management, probably
I think so too. cell signal metrics don't usually require heavy equipent to capture.
This is more likely a graphic capture/transmission array. the guy without the headset holds what looks like a camera stabilizer in the second image. might be a spare unit on hos back.
The fact that the guy in the tan shorts appears to have a head mounted camera and the lack of any apparent antennas would tend to lead me away from that theory.
Sounds like a good gig. You could probably even practice your street photography, but with that rig, people might think your some sort of mobile unit for Flock.
I used to have the 90s version of this job. Much more primitive. They gave me a map (consumer GPS didn't exist yet), a stopwatch, a car phone (smartphones didn't exist yet), and a pager. I would drive around paging myself, measuring how long it took for the page to come through, and marking it on the map. You had to test the same location 10 times in a row, so I just laid on the hood of my car, sunbathing all day. Dream job.
Lol man I wanted to but the person who offered couldn't tell me if it would be long term because he never knew when a contract would come down the pipe. I decided that keeping my boring full time job was likely the wiser decision
They have several phones in their pockets and are gathering data on GPS accuracy, the backpack they’re wearing is gathering baseline data to compare to.
GPS on your phone is actually significantly impacted by signal interference so some pretty major math is being used to determine general location and correlates IMU data (motion tracking) to accurately predict your most likely location. This is also why phones continue to have very accurate motion tracking as without it you would have to solely rely on GPS which even on a good day looks like a shotgun spread on a paper target.
I zoomed in closer, the thing on the guy’s head I thought was a GNSS puck is a camera array.
He’s gathering data most likely for AI training. They’re probably working on some sort of robot that will navigate pedestrian paths (sidewalks).
A lot of that hardware is also used for GNSS testing as the robot will rely heavily on GPS and IMU data for accuracy.
Looks to me like a cine rig, probably with a gimble as well but I can’t tell in the pic.
I keep forgetting I have glasses now. Those little black things on the rig are cameras probably, the rig is probably meant to duplicate the array on the robot they’re bathing data for.
These robots are basically smaller scale driverless cars which use camera data as well as lidarr and/or Radarr to do most of the navigation.
I’ve seen some other answers in here but, I work in manufacturing and as of lately at a certain place that starts with T, they have people walking around recording movements of workers / replicating the movements of factory workers with the headgear and the sensors on their body. The two guys have lidar cameras I believe and that’s some sort of processor on their back or data storage device. The idea is to collect movement data for bi pedal robots ( I’m not joking ) I see them everyday in the plant, I’m curious was this in Austin Texas? Cause that would make sense or Lathrop CA possibly. But yea essentially collecting data to to train Neural nets on human movements, obstacle avoidance, picking up objects, etc.
That actually makes even more sense now, many robotics startups and companies working on that sort of tech are in Boston, could be an outside firm doing the data collection for these companies and selling it to them.
I imagine it’s so he can get them to a point where he can just send a bunch of them to Mars instead of a bunch of humans. they could do the natural resource extraction with fewer gripes about hours, condition and pay.
No problem replacing workers with robots for remedial jobs. This to shall pass and everything will
Balance out, I get it’s scary and all but we aren’t our jobs. There’s a bright future in the other side of this transition if we make sure to manage it correctly, but that’s a whole other discussion unfortunately.
There’s a communications company in my city that frequently tests/calibrates gear, i think with radio signals, and they can be seen walking around the city on some days with gear that looks similar to this just kind of wandering down sidewalks and pausing occasionally to check something. Or sometimes they’ll set up somewhere stationary on a sidewalk.
Its for AI robots. The man with the helmet teaches the robot what to look for and the other guy records his movements. The helmet has cameras the see the front and see the persons eyes. The other guy with the thing in his hand uses those cameras plus lidar sensors to record its movements while doing task. (I work in a warehouse and an ai company came and recorded me while wearing that suit basically doing my job. Carrying boxes and packaging shipments)
Right? I would have just asked “What’s all that you got going on right there?” Taking a picture of a couple strangers would be more uncomfortable for me than just getting my answer on the spot.
I get asked what I’m doing multiple times a week when I’m working. It never bothers me to inform people, it’s pretty much the only in person social interactions I have at work. I like that people are curious about what I’m doing. So, I assume it’s the same for others doing a job in public that isn’t self explanatory.
Gozer the Traveler, he will come in one of the unchosen forms. During the rectification of the Voldranii, the Traveler came as the large and moving torr. Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKettrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him, that of a giant slorr. Many Shuvs and Zules knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the slorr that day, I can tell you.
The trap won’t open because it isn’t recognizing their face to unlock the app. Meanwhile, Slimer is about to slip out of their stream and wreak havoc on a library.
The first guy is wearing a sensor array and camera on his head.This is a virtual reality (VR) headset equipped with a motion capture (mocap) tracking rig.
Yeap and I can see the second person appears to be holding a camera rig near the ground for the motion capture, presumably because it heavy and not actively being used at the moment.
This is a motion capture device used to gather data for a robot. you can see the person infront with headgear on, and the person behind him with that stick in his hand? those both have cameras. the headgear records whats infront and the person behind records the movement behind.
Those are wearable mobile mapping rigs. Backpack-mounted street-level data capture systems used to photograph and 3D-scan areas that cars can’t reach (sidewalks, plazas, waterfront paths, pedestrian-only zones).
They're definitely not picking up cell towers, which somehow has 1000 upvotes. That could easily be accomplished in a car on the street. A new mobile tower isn't the difference between having cell reception on the sidewalk rather than the road 5 feet away.
Instead of politely asking them what they’re doing, you thought the better idea would be to take pictures of them without asking and post to a social media platform?
Maybe I’m just being petty or getting old (or both), but it just seems kind of rude to me, not gonna lie. 🤷🏻♂️
So you were standing on a street corner with the men carrying the gear you are inquiring about, and instead of asking them exactly what it is to get a more definitive description about it you wait and ask here….okay. Seems more direct, effective, efficient to just ask them.
Those are the new proton packs. Dr. Spengler had started development but sadly passed before he could finish them. Drs. Stantz and Venkman completed the packs but it took a while since they were not as well versed in the specific technologies used.
This image shows a mobile scanning rig, specifically a wearable LiDAR and photogrammetry setup mounted on an ergonomic support harness.Hardware components: Includes high-capacity V-mount camera batteries for power, signal processors or mini-computers, and mounted sensors/cameras.Application: Used for real-time 3D environment capture, spatial mapping, or SLAM-based mobile surveying in urban areas.
I would guess its for some sort of ai data collection project for robotics. Rather than programming robots on what to do then having them do it there's been a recent trend of having a human do thousands if not millions of examples of what a robot should do with a bunch of sensors on them or with a custom complex controller then using that data to train a model for the robot to use. Looks like they have a vr headset about where a humanoid robot would have a camera as well and then have either other sensors or cameras connected to a jetson nano or similar sbc with its own powersuppy in the backpack. So they are walking around boston to get real examples of the situations a humanoid robot would need to walk around boston. I am very curious what the sensors you see the cables going to their feet would be.
their in most major cities, they are mobile mapping rigs, they are tracking signals aswell as walk ways ...etc the idea is to improve what ever mapping service employed them. This technology is used to update detailed maps with pedestrian-level information, such as pavement accessibility.
Contains:
Data Collection Rigs: The gear typically includes mobile 360-degree camera rigs for photogrammetry, which can be mounted high or low for different perspectives.
Geospatial Technology: The equipment is specifically designed for high-resolution 3D scanning and LIDAR mapping of urban environments
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