this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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TPMS signals are too weak to read even 6 ft from the wheels.
No they aren't. Out of curiosity I setup an rtlsdr and connected it via RTL-HAOS to my home assistant server.
The antenna is in the middle of my house and over the last month I have logged over 200 different tire pressure sensor id's
Yep, through misunderstanding I left rtl_433 auto addition switched on for over a year.
I think I ended up with over 9000 unique tpms entries.
Clearing them out from MQTT was a pain in the backside, too!
Yeah, I don't know what the range is for picking these signals up, but I know that the detections just scroll on and on on my laptop's screen when there is any traffic near my house.
I never realized how chatty the world is on the radio spectrum until playing with one of these. From my house, I can see reports from half a dozen water meters (several reporting leaks), readings from wireless weather stations, signals from certain types of remotes, location data from aircraft, and of course bluetooth and wifi signals from phones and homes. The real trick in using this for tracking would be in filtering out all of the information you aren't interested in.
Yeah this is something a well trained neural network would make simple though. So long as you have the processing power, and enough storage.
I'd imagine you'd be able to purchase some identifying information from data brokers and eventually link ids to people or families.
Yes and no, I think. It isn't really huge amounts of data, and the patterns aren't super complex, so a neural network would pick up a lot. But, given how far the signals travel, the intermittent nature of the signals, and how little they can initially be associated with a particular vehicle, I think in most environments associating a particular set of signals with a particular car would require some human field work. Sure, there are circumstances where automated pairing would be trivial (like at a toll booth), but catching signals in the wild and processing by neural net alone might be ok for analyzing traffic patterns while not being enough for surveillance.
Thank you. Nobody is tracking your car from the fucking tpms sensors, they'll just use ur phone or GPS for God's sake 😂 hell if u put tpms sensors in backwards that's enough for the car not to read them. Another nothing burger.