New to RTL, can't receive anything with rtl_433

[Felipe Franciosi]

Hello!

I'm totally new to RTL-SDR and I bought a Nooelec SMARTee XTR bundle (although I don't have an active antenna, they were out of stock for the non-tee xtr). I'm using the 10.5" antenna that came in the bundle. I'm on a Mac M1 (on Monterey).

With CubicSDR 0.2.5 (installed w/ brew) I can see pulses (of data?) around the 868MHz band. Some relatively periodic, some when my Ring sensors trigger (door open or some movement). I was hoping to read my meters (which are OSM).

However, I'm not getting anything out of rtl_433. I've tried various command option combinations (mainly fiddling with frequency and sample rate) to no avail. I also tried "-A -R 0" which, IIUC, should show me _something_ (which I can later translate with a decoder).

What I'm doing wrong?

Thanks for any pointers!

F.

[Christian Z.]

Did you try https://triq.org/rtl_433/ANALYZE.html to capture a transmission?

Maybe also use -Y autolevel for better sensitivity and -M level -M noise to get more detailed information.

[Felipe Franciosi]

Ha this was very helpful! Thank you.

I managed to capture some stuff. I also noticed that if I move close to the smart meter I'm trying to read, I can receive a periodic message exactly 14s apart. rtl_433 doesn't know how to decode that, though, so I'll be fiddling some more before I come back with either my findings or asking for more help.

Thanks!

F.