Can I mess around with this?

Sub-GHz
#1

I work for a company that uses these little transceivers to read water meters. I’m not looking to do any serious mischief, but really just mess around with my Flipper. I have no real end goal other than just messing around.

Is this something I could mess around with?
They are called “MXUs” and made by a company called Sensus. This particular model is a 520M

From what I’ve gathered, they operate in the range of 900-950MHz, but that’s about all I know.

They read up to two water meters wirelessly, then are themselves read by one of multiple towers, or by a drive by truck.

I don’t know much else about them.
Pics attached.

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#2

Wow, that thing can put out 2 Watts. That’s better then a lot of walkie talkies in the bubble packs. I’m having a difficult time finding any information about the protocol other then it’s “proprietary”. That isn’t the first thing I would want to start with as a beginner but there may be thing the Flipper could do with it.

fcc.io/sdbwfl2

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#3

Yeah, I’ll fiddle around with them on my spare time. I actually think I picked up a signal from it by accident when I left the flipper on read raw. 925.something mhz. They send out a signal every 4 hours.

They send and receive, and talk to towers that are 5+ miles away. I will fiddle around with it, and the handheld device used to program them.

I’m always curious about what signals are zooming around my head.

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#4

If you can figure out how to wake it up that would make things easier. From what I read there must be a signal they can send to initiate a read sequence. A lot of our meters use ZigBee but I don’t think that does. I’ve never heard of ZigBee using 2 watts.

#5

You could try making a Faraday cage. I think an aluminum garbage can and some tin foil might be enough to attenuate the other signals at 900Mhz.