meterradio

Two failure modes · both common

When it does not work

Almost everything that goes wrong lands in one of two buckets, and they need opposite responses.

Total silence

I hear nothing

No decodes at all, not even a stranger's meter. Work the antenna first — it is almost never the software.

 Partial success

Only neighbours

Plenty of decodes, none of them yours. Good news: the receiver is proven. Now it is a signal-path problem.

Which one you have is the first question

The distinction matters more than any individual fix, because the two buckets have opposite diagnoses:

  • Silence means you cannot yet distinguish "my receiver is broken" from "my meter does not transmit." Those are wildly different problems and everything in the no-signal page is about separating them.
  • Neighbours but not you means the receiver is proven working. Nothing about drivers, sample rates, or software configuration can be the cause. It is a geometry and signal-path problem, and a much better position to be in.

So before changing anything, run one unfiltered capture and note which bucket you are in:

rtlamr -msgtype=scm,scm+,idm,r900,r900bcd -filterid=

If any ID at all appears, you are in the second bucket.

The rule that saves the most time

Nothing is not a diagnosis. A broken antenna, a meter with no radio in it, a wrong band, and a misconfigured decoder all produce byte-for-byte identical output — an empty screen. You cannot debug by staring at it, and you cannot conclude anything from it.

Every useful step below is a step that changes silence into information: proving the antenna against a known transmitter, proving the dongle against a known signal, proving the band with a spectrum sweep. Get one positive result, then reason from it.

Before either page

Two things belong at the top of any diagnosis, because both are cheap and both invalidate everything downstream:

  1. Confirm the meter transmits at all. Look up its FCC ID. Roughly one meter radio in three is not in the 902–928 MHz band, and no amount of troubleshooting fixes a meter that was never going to be audible. This is the single most common wasted weekend on this site.
  2. Confirm the dongle enumerates. rtl_test should report a tuner type and run without USB errors. If it does not, nothing else is worth attempting.