How does the power company actually get the information transmitted by the meter?<p>One of the articles the author links to says that it is collected by the power company sending someone with an appropriate receiver to drive around collecting the data.<p>However, my power company website lets you look up your usage on their website, and that is updated daily which makes me seriously doubt that there are any manual steps in its collection. In particular, it gets read on those occasions every few years when we get enough snow to close down traffic on side streets like mine.<p>My meter is at least 11 years, and appears quite old fashioned--it's got the spinning disc to show instantaneous usage and analog dials to display the cumulative usage.<p>I'm not actually sure that my meter has remote read capability. I read somewhere that some power companies add remote reading to older installations by putting something on the pole where the lines to a particular house branch off.<p>There are some mysterious signals in the 900 MHz neighborhood that show up on my SDR. I've seen them at 929.616, 929.664, 929.940, 931.066, 931.216, 931.865, and 931.942 MHz, and have not been able to figure out what they are from. Mostly, they consist of periodical short (about 1 second) bursts of something digital followed a few seconds later by a longer burst (several seconds), then silence for maybe a minute, and then repeat.<p>Some seemed to be in pairs, where one would send a short burst, then another would send a long burst. I suspected that this may have been my "Weather Channel" weather meter, which has an outdoor sensor and an indoor display, and operates in the 900 MHz area. I suspected the short burst was the indoor unit asking the sensor for a report, and the sensor responding. I ruled that out, though, by taking the batteries out of the indoor unit and seeing no change in the signal pair.<p>It's been a while since I looked at these, and so I took another look--and now I don't see that apparent pair. I'm not thinking that that one wasn't two things talking to each other, but two separate things that just happened to have their reports lined up so that it looked like they were talking to each other.<p>I had guessed that they might be power meters, but I have not been able to find anything that looks like it could be the receiver for them. I don't see anything on the poles around here other than the usual transformers, and we don't have any evident equipment pedestals. The signals don't seem very strong, so I've been assuming that whatever they are talking to cannot be far away. That made power meters seem less likely.