Santa Clarita Wireless Site Survey: Ekahau AI Pro Design Plus On-Site Validation

Timeline depends on scope. A single-floor commercial space with complete as-built drawings — a Stevenson Ranch retail pad or a Valencia office floor — can be predictively modeled in Ekahau AI Pro and quoted within two business days. An AP-on-a-Stick field validation for that same floor takes one to two days on-site. Multi-building campus engagements like a Henry Mayo-scale clinical footprint or a College of the Canyons multi-campus refresh typically run two to four weeks from floor plan receipt to final deliverable, including voice-grade validation and the independent validation report. A Valencia Industrial Center tilt-up warehouse with 400,000+ sq ft and full racking typically runs three to ten business days on site depending on clear-height. Every engagement is scoped and quoted as a fixed-fee SOW before work begins — the timeline, scope, and deliverables are defined in writing. We do not bill hourly against an open-ended estimate.

A predictive survey uses Ekahau AI Pro to model RF propagation through a calibrated floor plan. No physical measurement occurs — the software simulates signal paths through assigned wall materials and produces coverage heatmaps and an AP placement plan. It is fast and accurate for standard construction materials. An AP-on-a-Stick survey mounts a production-model AP on a telescopic pole at the intended deployment height, and the Ekahau Sidekick 2 captures real measurements — actual RSSI, SNR, and noise floor from ‑20 to ‑92 dBm — as the surveyor walks the floor. For SCV buildings with atypical attenuation (Valencia Industrial Center tilt-up concrete panels with embedded rebar, Henry Mayo lead-lined imaging suites, CalArts soundstage walls with acoustic treatment layers, 40-ft warehouse steel racking, CMU-block K-12 classrooms) or where as-built drawings are unreliable, the AP-on-a-Stick pass is required before procurement. Most WFHS engagements include both: Ekahau AI Pro predictive for initial design and AP count, AP-on-a-Stick for validation before the bill of materials is finalized.

All of the Santa Clarita Valley — no mileage charge inside the SCV footprint. That covers the city of Santa Clarita (Valencia, Saugus, Newhall, Canyon Country), Stevenson Ranch, Castaic, Val Verde, Agua Dulce, and the unincorporated LA County SCV communities. Named institutional coverage includes Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, College of the Canyons (Valencia + Canyon Country), CalArts Valencia, Princess Cruises corporate headquarters in Santa Clarita, Six Flags Magic Mountain, and the Valencia Industrial Center corridor tilt-up warehouse corridor. We also dispatch into adjacent service areas — the San Fernando Valley over Newhall Pass, the Antelope Valley over Vasquez Canyon, west to Ventura County, and south into LA County — under the same fixed-fee SOW structure. Our Valencia HQ at 23890 Copper Hill Drive means zero travel markup inside SCV and same-day mobilization where needed.

Every engagement is priced as a fixed-fee SOW — we do not bill hourly. Scope variables that drive cost: total building square footage, number of floors, number of buildings, construction type (standard office drywall vs. Valencia Industrial Center tilt-up concrete vs. CMU-block school vs. CalArts soundstage atypical materials), required survey type (predictive-only in Ekahau AI Pro, AP-on-a-Stick, or combined predictive-plus-validation), and whether post-install validation and a formal validation report are in scope. We return a written SOW quote within two business days of receiving floor plans and a scope description. Send floor plans to sales@wifihotshots.com or call (844) 946-8746. No engagement begins without the client signing off on the fixed-fee price first, and no hidden change orders appear against the signed SOW number without a separate signed change order.

Every engagement produces: the Ekahau AI Pro project file (.esx) for future re-use; annotated heatmap exports per frequency band (2.4, 5, 6 GHz) per floor showing RSSI, SNR, secondary coverage (802.11k), and co-channel interference against a ‑85 dBm CCI threshold; a vendor-agnostic AP bill of materials with mount type, antenna, PoE class (802.3af/at/bt), and cabling callouts referenced to ANSI/TIA-568.2-E; an installation runbook for the contractor with AP placement drawing and ANSI/TIA-569 cable pathway map; and a post-install validation report with passive heatmap confirmation, iPerf3 throughput results, 802.11r handoff timing, and MOS trace data for voice-grade engagements. The deliverable set is the same regardless of the AP vendor — Cisco Catalyst 9166I, Meraki MR57, Aruba AP-655, Juniper Mist AP45, Ruckus, or Extreme. The documentation belongs to the client and is formatted for a 10-year shelf life.

Yes. Passive survey requires no network access and causes zero disruption to production traffic — the Ekahau Sidekick 2 listens passively and never associates to any SSID, so clinical telemetry at Henry Mayo-class campuses and VoWLAN forklift handsets in Valencia Industrial Center warehouses continue operating without interference. Active throughput testing and roaming validation require a brief association to a production or test SSID, which does not affect other clients on the network. Full iPerf3 load testing, which generates several hundred Mbps of synthetic traffic to stress the uplink, is scheduled during off-hours or in a maintenance window if the client requests it. We have conducted passive surveys in live healthcare clinical environments, active corporate headquarters operations, and operating distribution centers without interrupting production. The pre-survey coordination document we send before mobilization identifies which test phases, if any, require an off-hours or maintenance window.

The survey instruments are the same; the design targets differ. SCV K-12 — Hart UHSD (6 comprehensive high schools (Hart, Canyon, Valencia, Saugus, Golden Valley, Castaic) within a 16-school district grades 7–12), Saugus USD, Castaic USD, Newhall SD, Sulphur Springs USD — is designed for 1:1 Chromebook client density at 32 students per classroom plus teacher device, not the lower density of a corporate open-plan floor. That changes the AP placement interval, the channel width selection (20 MHz standard in high-density zones to control CCI), and the roaming design across wing and portable-classroom transitions. Hart and Saugus survey engagements are typically scheduled during summer recess to allow room-by-room passive walkthroughs without bell-schedule disruption. E-rate Category 2 procurement requirements mean the deliverable set must include documentation compatible with the district’s USAC submission. For College of the Canyons and CalArts Valencia, ADA-accessible AP mounting locations and outdoor coverage for the Canyon Country hillside campus add a field-validation requirement that a flat-floor predictive model cannot resolve. Lecture halls at 150–250 seat density drive tighter AP placement than a typical corporate conference room.

The fixed-fee SOW covers the defined scope. If the survey uncovers something outside that scope — an ERRCS gap at a Henry Mayo clinical building that crosses the 50,000 sq ft threshold requiring a licensed BDA integrator, a structured cabling deficiency in a Valencia Industrial Center tilt-up warehouse that needs remediation before APs can be installed, a DAS antenna placement conflict at a Six Flags service building, or a classified overlay that falls outside our unclassified commercial envelope — we document the finding in the validation report with a clear description of the issue and its location. We then issue a separate change-order estimate for any additional WFHS scope and, where the finding is outside wireless engineering (like ERRCS installation or cleared-facility work), we refer to the appropriate licensed contractor. The client is never billed above the SOW total without a signed change order first. WiFi Hotshots does not claim, and does not provide, classified / SCIF / SAP / cleared-facility work — classified overlays inside SCV go to a cleared integrator, not WFHS. That is the operational definition of a fixed-fee engagement.