Just curious what this is? Spotted in suburban northeast US. Didn’t see anything wlse like it around but maybe I just missed them.
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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What is this thing?
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Oh, that’s interesting. I never thought about the meters communicating on their own network.
My smart electric meter has a zigbee symbol on it. It's likely a locked down encrypted proprietary network, but it's there. I spoke to the installer and he didn't know what it was but did say they were on their own network. Mesh makes sense too. You can have one of these pick up a neighborhood, and each house connects to all the rest. Can even be flaky, they just need it to connect once per billing cycle.
A lot of those are not encrypted and can be read with a cheap sdr dongle.
Mine is. I have one and tried. I can't even see it. I also have a similar looking antenna at the end of my street.
I have a smart meter that allows grid controllers to remotely charge and discharge my battery to smooth out high demand peaks (I earn money from it) but I haven't been able to record a coherent bitstream from it with my SDR yet. I assume it's encrypted and/or proprietary data.
From what im told, the transmitters lie dormant most of the time (at least for gas). Only when they receive a signal do they send a signal, except when they are activated by a technician. When activated, they broadcast a signal to reach either another device on the network, or a reciever like the one in op's pic.