I’ve recently installed the SDR to Home Assistant integration and I’m using a Nooelec NESDR Mini 2 USB RTL-SDR stick.
I’ve had it for a few days with no restrictions and I saw that it detected a ton of devices… mainly cars? and some temp/humidity devices… including some soil sensors… didn’t know my neighbours were so into home automation, lol!
My goal was to try to add somehow the Somfy Eolis RTS sun/wind sensor that I have up in my shades.
I added “-R 167” in the protocols field since I saw that that’s the number for Somfy devices…
I’ve had it for a few (almost 30) minutes and I don’t see anything created in MQTT like before…
Using -R means it will only show that protocol and then it is a question about when your device actually choose to transmit.
My fire alarms only transmit when low on battery or when a fire is detected, so it is mute until then, which makes it kind of hard to know if it is working.
They might not be that close-by neighbours, SDR can travel for hundreds of miles!
I’ve not heard of SDR for quite a long time. Someone I know (Not me, definitely not me, see below) experimented for a while about ten years ago, logging messages received. There was a lot of automation messages, mostly air conditioning and professional installations. And even then, there was a lot of pager traffic between humans and automated alerting systems, including a lot that sounded medical or emergency service in nature even though they were supposed to be on more modern and secure systems by then. There was also a lot of encrypted or illegible gibberish.
Word of caution for any UK readers: It can be considered illegal here in the UK to listen to SDR (Something like the Interception of telecommunications act which has some serious jail time) but I suspect it’s something that would be hard to prove and unlikely to secure a conviction today.