Neptune R900 Reception

[Christopher Norulak]

Good Afternoon,

Trying to measure my Neptune E-CODER R900i and I seem to be picking up all of my neighbors - but not my own - is there anything I'm missing? I'm using a NESDR Nano 2+ and the antenna is located maybe 20 feet away from the meter. Running under Home Assistant with the rtl_433 (next) branch.

Using MQTT explorer, I can see plenty of R900 units of various IDs. I tried adjusting the gain from auto, to 0.9 to 35 and scanning over the frequency listed in the manual (902Mhz to 928Mhz) initially over a period of 40 seconds (to ensure I pick up a signal since it appears to send signals every 14-20 seconds) - I then tried scanning over a period of 7.5 minutes in case I was misinterpreting the manual... I also noticed that the meters seem to stick in the 911 to 918 Mhz range, so I tried to play around with limiting the frequency range.

I also tried setting the sampling rate to 200K to match what was used in the initial PR that added R900 support.

Conf file:

output mqtt://...

hop_interval 450

convert native

protocol 228

sample_rate 2000k

gain 30.0

report_meta level

# frequency 902M

# frequency 903M

# frequency 904M

# frequency 905M

# frequency 906M

frequency 907M

frequency 908M

frequency 909M

frequency 910M

frequency 911M

frequency 912M

frequency 913M

frequency 914M

frequency 915M

frequency 916M

frequency 917M

frequency 918M

frequency 919M

frequency 920M

frequency 921M

frequency 922M

frequency 923M

frequency 924M

frequency 925M

frequency 926M

frequency 927M

frequency 928M

[Christopher Norulak]

Not exactly sure what I was doing wrong, but I am sure I was doing something wrong - I ended up resolving this by using rtlamr2mqtt instead of rtl-433.

rtlamr config:

rtltcp: "-s 2048000"
rtlamr: "-unique=true"

- id: <ID from unit here>
  protocol: r900
  name: Water Meter
  format: "#####.##"
  unit_of_measurement: gal
  icon: mdi:water
  device_class: water

Sensor:

mqtt:

  sensor:

    - name: "Neptune Water Meter"

      unique_id: sensor.watermeter

      state_topic: "rtlamr/<ID here>/attributes"

      value_template: "{{value_json.Consumption | float / 10}}"

      unit_of_measurement: "gal"

      device_class: water

      state_class: total_increasing

      icon: "mdi:water"

      availability:

        - topic: "rtlamr/status"

      payload_available: "online"

      payload_not_available: "offline"

(I need to confirm the math works - I think the meter only reports to 1 decimal, while the display actually reads 2 decimals)