The situation
Before a telecom site goes live, its electromagnetic-energy (EME) exposure has to be checked against what the regulator has on record. In practice that means an engineer sitting with two documents — the authoritative ACMA / RFNSA registration on one side, the operator-submitted EME Guide on the other — and comparing antenna parameters by hand, row by row, across a PDF and a spreadsheet.
It is slow, it is easy to get wrong, and it does not scale. Each site took around 45 minutes of careful, error-prone cross-checking, and the work only grew with the rollout.
What we built
A single-tenant internal platform that does the cross-check automatically. An engineer uploads an EME Guide; the system pulls the matching authoritative records, diffs every antenna parameter against them within configurable tolerances, and surfaces only the mismatches that need a human decision.
Both PDF and Word guides are parsed natively. A drawing-analysis pipeline built on Claude Vision compares site drawings against the recorded configuration — catching discrepancies that never appear in a parameter table.
How it works
The backend is a FastAPI service that integrates directly with the RFNSA portal to fetch the source-of-truth data, then runs a pure-logic diff engine against the parsed guide. The frontend is a static Next.js app served from the same box. The whole thing runs on a single ARM64 EC2 instance in Sydney with RDS behind it, Cognito for access (email-whitelisted to the team), Cloudflare in front, and secrets in SSM. Infrastructure is Terraform; deploys go out through GitHub Actions over OIDC — no long-lived AWS keys anywhere.
The architecture was kept deliberately boring so the team can run, debug, and extend it without us in the loop.
Why it matters
Compliance work is exactly the kind of high-stakes, repetitive cross-checking that drains expert time and invites mistakes. Collapsing a 45-minute manual audit into a sub-five-minute review doesn't just save hours — it makes the result consistent, auditable, and ready to scale with the next wave of sites.