Last updated 2026-08-08
Affiliate disclosure
The current state is simple: there are no affiliate links on this site yet. Here is what will be true when there are.
Right now
There are no affiliate links on this site. Nothing on the hardware page earns a commission today. No advertising is served, and no sponsored content has been accepted or published.
This page exists because that is likely to change, and because the honest version of that change is one written down in advance rather than added quietly afterwards.
When it changes
If and when affiliate links are added — most plausibly to hardware retailers, for the dongles, antennas and cables the hardware page discusses:
- They will be disclosed on the page that carries them, close to the link itself, not only here.
- The price you pay does not change. An affiliate tag tells the retailer where a referral came from. It does not add anything to your total.
- This page will be updated first, with the date, and will name the programmes involved.
If advertising is ever served, the same applies: named here, and visibly marked as advertising where it appears.
The rules the recommendations follow either way
Commission creates a bias, and the only useful response is a set of constraints that hold regardless of whether anything is being earned. These are the ones this site works to.
"Do not buy this" stays on the page
The most valuable thing here is the front-page lookup, whose whole purpose is telling roughly a third of visitors not to buy anything, because their meter transmits outside the band an RTL-SDR can use. That advice earns nothing and it is not going anywhere. A site that quietly stopped saying it would be worthless.
The cheap answer stays the recommended answer
A $30 dongle is genuinely sufficient for reading meters, and the hardware page says so — including a "what not to buy" section that argues against the expensive receivers that would pay better. The antenna advice often amounts to "collapse the whip you already own to 8.2 cm," which earns nothing at all.
Recommending away from hardware entirely
The electric meter page concludes that for a closed mesh meter, a clamp-on CT sensor is strictly better than anything this site could sell you on. That conclusion came from the engineering, and it stays.
Nothing recommended that has not been used
The hardware advice comes from a working deployment, including its failures — the broken antenna element that cost a day, and the driver trap that makes one popular dongle a bad default recommendation. Products do not appear here because a programme pays well.
No sponsored content
No manufacturer or retailer has paid for a mention, reviewed a draft, or had any input into what this site says. If that ever changes it will be labelled on the page in question, unmissably, and noted here with a date.
FTC
US readers: the Federal Trade Commission requires clear and conspicuous disclosure of material connections between a publisher and the products it recommends. That is what this page is for, and it will be kept accurate — including right now, when the accurate statement is that there are no such connections.