Terrestrial shield

[N6BY]

You can view your electric usage (and other meters in your neighborhood) with an SDR and software to decode the signal that the meter generates periodically. Most electric meters are Itron C1SRs and transmit in the ISM band around 915 MHz. Here is a link to an article explaining this: http://hackaday.com/2014/02/25/using-sdr-to-read-your-smart-meter/

I checked this frequency here and there are lots of blips that show up in the SDR waterfall in the range of frequencies of the C1SR. I never actually decoded any of the blips, but it looks like it would be quite easy with a little effort.

 

[N6BY]

I decided to give the meter reader code a try and it worked fine. First I ran it with no filter and it displayed packets from all meters. Then I went out to my meter and checked my device ID and used it as the filter. A usage packet was received about every ten seconds for my meter.

Each packet contains the date, time, tamper flags, and (of course) the current usage.

Here is what one of the packets looked like for my meter:

{Time:2017-05-21T00:29:34.514 SCM:{ID:18680855 Type: 7 Tamper:{Phy:02 Enc:03} Consumption: 3548333 CRC:0x47A2}}

I also received hundreds of other packets from neighboring meters.

 

[Foxbat]

According to the Service Tech who installed them, the meters our Water Company uses are passive. They listen for the reader driving by and ping the reply when queried. Otherwise, they're silent. They live in the basement not far from the water meter, and the antenna/datalogger package is about the size of a can of Red Bull which gets mounted up in the bay between floor joists. I'm not sure what our Gas and Electric companies are using.