Lookup/Troubleshooting/Only neighbours
I hear neighbours but not my own meter
Good news first: this proves your receiver works. It is now a geometry problem, and geometry problems are solvable.
Six strong meter IDs are scrolling past and none of them is yours. This feels like failure and is actually the better of the two failure modes, because it eliminates an entire category of cause.
Your antenna is good, your dongle works, your driver is correct, your sample rate is adequate, your decoder is configured for the right band and the right message types, and there is real meter traffic where you are listening.
None of those can be the cause. Stop changing software.
What remains is either that your meter is quieter than your neighbours' — a signal path problem — or that your meter has no radio in it. Both are addressable, but first you have to be certain you would recognise your own ID if you saw it.
Step 1: Identify your own meter, properly
The mistake here is assuming the strongest signal is yours. It very often is not. Your gas meter may be in a basement behind a poured foundation wall while your neighbour's is bolted to an outside wall thirty feet away with clear line of sight. Physics does not care whose property it is.
There are two reliable ways to establish which ID belongs to you, and you should use whichever the meter allows.
Match the ID printed on the meter
The meter ID in an SCM packet is the same number printed or stamped on the faceplate. Photograph the plate, then compare. This is the fastest method when the number is legible.
Watch for two things: leading zeros are often dropped in decoded output, and the plate may carry both a utility account number and the radio's ID, which are different numbers.
Match the consumption value against the register
The stronger method, because it cannot be faked by coincidence: read your own dials, then find the packet whose number matches.
| Step | Do this |
|---|---|
| 1 | Read the physical register on your meter and write the number down, with the time. |
| 2 | Capture unfiltered for a few minutes and collect every ID with its consumption value. |
| 3 | Find the ID whose value matches your register. That is yours. |
| 4 | Confirm it. Run a known load — an outside tap, a gas appliance — and check that the same ID moves. |
Step 4 is the one worth not skipping. It also verifies your whole decode pipeline end to end, which nothing else on this page does.
Guessing wrong is not obvious and does not correct itself. A neighbour's meter produces a perfectly plausible series that rises and falls in believable ways, and there is nothing in the data to tell you it is not yours. People graph a stranger's heating for a month before something forces the question.
It is also worth being deliberate about what you do next. Receiving an unencrypted broadcast on your own equipment is one thing; retaining and analysing an identified neighbour's consumption is a different thing, and the neighbourly answer is to filter to your own ID and discard the rest.
Step 2: Improve the path to your own meter
Once you know which ID to look for and it is genuinely absent, treat it as the geometry problem it is.
- Move the antenna, not the dongle. Toward the meter, and outside if at all possible. One wall costs more signal than any dongle upgrade recovers. A window on the meter's side of the house is often the whole fix.
- Get height — but not always. Height helps for a wall-mounted gas meter. For a water meter in a ground-level pit, lower and closer can beat higher, because you are receiving through a slot at ground level rather than from a clear mount.
- Capture for much longer. Water meters transmit considerably less often than gas ERTs to stretch battery life. Fifteen minutes of quiet from a pit-mounted transmitter means nothing; run an hour before concluding anything.
- Reconsider the neighbours as a diagnostic. Note which neighbours you hear. If every ID you receive is on one side of the house, your antenna has a directional bias you did not intend — a metal appliance, a foil-backed wall, a radiator — and moving it a metre may change everything.
- Filter after you find it, not before. Keep running unfiltered while you experiment. Filtering to an ID you have not yet confirmed hides the evidence you need.
Step 3: Accept the likeliest answer
If neighbours decode reliably over an hour and your own ID never appears, the explanation is usually the simple one: your meter does not transmit.
That is the normal case, not an edge case. Gas, water and electric are three separate decisions made by three separate companies, often decades apart, and one readable meter out of three at an address is a typical outcome. At one surveyed address the gas meter decoded at 912.6 MHz, the water meter was a mechanical register with no radio, and the electric meter was an induction disk containing no electronics at all — while two neighbours came in stronger than the target.
Hearing your neighbours is what confirms this rather than leaving it ambiguous. Without them you could not distinguish "no radio" from "broken receiver." With them, you have your answer: check the other two utilities, because they were installed at different times and may not share the verdict.
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