rtlamr

A few years ago I used an RTL-SDR to determine if I had a water leak since my meter is one that broadcasts over 900mhz (iirc). I wrote a small program to parse RTL-AMR output into Prometheus metrics (real life gauges are just like Prometheus gauges, who would've thought) and tracked it over a week while I was away on vacation. No leak luckily. RTL-AMR: https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

Unencrypted, I'm sure. I hadn't thought to look for smart meters, but my RTL-SDR (and my Flipper Zero) can pick up all sorts of temperature sensors, etc. A quick google found this rtlamr project with a number of blog posts about people doing this with it. https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

rtlamr! https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

If your meter is not too old, it probably sends wireless signal for consumption data. It can be read with https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

My municipal water meter transmits readings in the clear on the 915 MHz band. There's a neat program to catch the readings: https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

Here they drive a car/truck around which reads the meters via a signal on the ISM band. I listen to these and other automated meter broadcasts with an RPi, a TV dongle, and this software: https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

Not OP, but in my jurisdiction the smart power meters broadcast consumption as SCM at 900MHz. rtlamr https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr does a good job of receiving and decoding those broadcasts using a cheap SDR. My local water utility also broadcasts consumption as SCM+, also 900MHz. I'm able to grab both with the single SDR.

using this: https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr, I could read the meters of about 30 of my neighbors... and I was not living in apartments... Yards in that neighborhood were about 150ftx75ft. And I would get meter reading updates about every other minute. I used the stock rtl-sdr antenna and didn't even place it outside my home.

I do this with a cheap (~$20) USB RTL-SDR – no Arduino or custom electronics necessary. Of course, I only use it to monitor my own energy usage (electricity and gas) using rtlamr[1] and a script that periodically sends the data to InfluxDB, then displayed using Grafana. The result is a smart home energy monitor that doesn't require any clamps near the electrical panel, and it exactly matches the usage for which I'll be billed. [1] https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

At least the ones I have seen are not. I am able to read the all the power meters in my building with a cheap USB SDR and this software. https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr I have not gotten around to figuring out which one is mine or a good way to system to store/display the data but I certainly can read the date. In the grand scheme of things it is a minor to medium security flaw, power usage could be used to infer which houses contain valuable items and when people are home. I'd say medium at most since a lot of other things Visible curbside indicate this as well (lights, cars in the driveway, etc.). On the other hand, electronics are pretty efficient. A wealthy house with all the lights on is still using less electricity than a small apartment using an electric stove. But I guess if you were really interested in stealing electric cars

I was impacted by this, and ended up building my own replacement with a Raspberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant, a Honeywell T6 Z-wave thermostat, and rtlamr (https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr) to read the smart meter signal.

I have a rtlsdr dongle.. I don't know anything about gnu radio, but these are all useful, and using them isn't super complicated. https://github.com/antirez/dump1090 https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433

You could use it for that but there is software made specifically for this, like dump1090 for Linux (here for other options: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/adsb-aircraft-radar-with-rtl-sdr/)... What I found funny when I tried it is that many small airplanes don't broadcast that signal... are they FBI's planes? Another interesting use can be reading your electric meter (and the ones of your neighbors), using GNU Radio or https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr . Another one, is reading TPMS from your car wheels (or cars that are passing by): https://www.rtl-sdr.com/receiving-decoding-tire-pressure-mon... , https://github.com/jboone/tpms

If your meter broadcasts your household energy usage, you may be able to use a ~$20 SDR dongle hooked up to a Raspberry Pi to read the kWh of the whole house several times per minute. There are some little tools that make this easy: https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr You'll need to do a little detective work to separate yours out from the neighbors' but it's not hard. For my house, I can also read water usage and natural gas the same way by alternating through the relevant frequencies.

I use https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr for tracking my electric and gas usage on a minute-by-minute basis.