Is a smart meter mandatory? As an amateur radio operator I'm worried the signals may interfere

Ah ok, thanks for that. It helps a lot! Thanks for the assist by the way Luke. :)

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Just a heads up by the way, your Cisco APs are End of Life as of yesterday. It might be a good time to upgrade your kit when you get chance.

Anyway, onto the main event. As far as I’m aware, you shouldn’t cause any interference issues. The ZigBee HAN is on the 2.4GHz band which is the same as 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, so if you’re already keeping clear of Wi-Fi on 2.4GHz and 5GHz, then you’re definitely not going to clash with ZigBee stuff either. While not relevant for Smart Meter purposes, Z-Wave runs on 868.40 MHz and 869.85 MHz in the UK and EU, so if you can avoid those two as well, you'll definitely keep the neighbours very happy. No doubt you’ve already considered that though!

As for WAN comms, Luke is correct. You’re in the Southern Territory (well, technically Central Territory) and therefore it’d be the Telefonica WAN which uses Cellular. As long as you’re keeping clear of the frequencies used by GPRS and GSM, then you’re definitely out of the way of ALL SMETS1 and SMETS2 Smart Meters in your area. The Long-Range Radio based Arqiva WAN is only used in the Northern Territory and you’re over 150 miles away from that, which is probably well out of range and I’d call it out of scope in this case.

Given that all of that stuff is either on licensed frequencies and/or on frequencies that don’t tend to get used for HAM Radio, I think you’re pretty safe. Ofcom will have almost certainly considered these factors before granting any such licenses to basically anyone and no doubt you’d be alerted if things changed.

I can’t think of any likely issues that would be caused by your equipment and Smart Meters do have to be capable of dealing with any such interference and work around it, just like everything else does. Most of the significant activity happens overnight anyway, so chances are that’d be when you’re asleep. It’s not easy to accidentally break a meter and I would be absolutely stunned if you managed to trigger a fault condition or a phantom tamper alert with a HAM Radio. But if you did, I bet the meter manufacturer would probably want to fix the design flaw to prevent it happening again with their meters. That wouldn’t be your fault though - all incidents of possible tampering are investigated. If the investigation determines it to be a false alarm, no further action will be taken other than to perhaps apologise for the inconvenience and reset the tamper alarm.

I didn’t manage to chat with my friend today, but I don’t recall him ever mentioning any cases where he’s known someone with an amateur radio license brick a Smart Meter with their activities.

But yes… RAF Flyingdales causes nightmares for Smart Meter purposes. So much so that the Data Communications Company has been forced to temporarily blacklist the area around Flyingdales as having no WAN coverage until they’re able to develop a special Comms Hub that can deal with the intensive transmissions from that particular RAF base and not be affected by them. I doubt your kit will ever be that overpowered! XD

I’m really glad to see that your intentions are to play fair though, which is great. You did the right thing by asking or advice first and we can definitely try to find out more details if you need them, especially to avoid clashes.

Ultimately, even if your transmissions prevent Smart Meter comms from working, it’s not the end of the world. You can still submit manual readings if needed and MyOVO will unlock that option if five days pass with no Smart reading. You’ll also be able to submit by phone at anytime. The only functionality that would be affected at all would really just be Smart communications. But even then, Smart Meters are designed to be able to run in “offline mode” if needed so that still allows your supply to keep working regardless.

And yep, I totally agree with you regarding HomePlugs. In fact, after the HomePlug Alliance was terminated around 2016/17, pretty much all development of the HomePlug Standards has basically been abandoned with little to no progress ever since. They really don’t work that well anyway and there’s far better solutions like Ubiquiti UniFi or Ruckus Unleashed if people really want decent Wi-Fi, which are far less noisy than HomePlugs…

Anyway, I definitely agree that it would be good for you to get that meter switched out with a new one. If the replacement happens to either be a Smart Meter OR a Single Rate Traditional Meter, OVO will take care of updating your account records to remove the requirement to submit two readings at once. The engineer will also remove any time switch or teleswitching devices that were hooked up as well at no extra charge, since you’d no longer have a need for them.

I think it would be a good idea for you to discuss this particular Meter Exchange with the Support Team before going ahead, especially due to the circumstances you mentioned and it’s definitely worth bringing that up. It might be that OVO needs to do a bit more planning ahead than usual, but you’ll know when you ask.

Might be a good one for OVO’s internal Smart Meter Friend actually when I think about it. I’ll see what @Tim_OVO thinks when he’s back on Monday.

Hehehe, as long as you’re aware, that’s the main thing.

Mind you, since you have them you may as well make use of them for now. I think that model has a built-in spectrum analyser iirc. It’s not guaranteed, but if you can somehow get hold of the companion software and get it to run, you might be able to do an RF Scan of the environment to identify potential interference and deploy some workarounds if needed.

Just be mindful that older Cisco kit tends to start to “fail” after EoL is reached. Someone I know has a whole bunch of Cisco Aironet 2702i APs and pretty much all of them are showing signs of imminent failure (along with the controller actually)… Right after EoL was reached too. 

I can’t make any promises that Tim will be able to get any further answers, but this is actually a seriously good one. I wouldn’t be surprised if any other HAM Radio enthusiasts are interested in the same question.

Thanks @Jess_OVO  - I had heard of the issues discussed in that thread, but they seem to be more concerned with SMETS 1 so I don’t think it’s that relevant any more. Regarding interference, the problem with close range (“near field”) issues is that they don’t quite follow the usual rules of radio usage. A strong signal only a few metres away need not be on anything like the same frequency as the one interfered with to cause problems, and one of my concerns was/is high-power transmissions by me disturbing the meter, rather than the other way around. I don’t find problems with GSM signals and my radios in either direction so that is fine, but I can, if not careful, easily interfere with TV reception which is on an entirely different band from the one I might be using. A local signal like that will be significantly stronger than anything emitted even from military installations a matter of miles away like RAF Fylingdales and its region of influence, and could easily swamp communications elsewhere in the spectrum if they are not adequately filtered, but since I am in the West Midlands region my meter would not be using that vulnerable system anyway. I am reaching the conclusion that things won’t be as bad as they might be, but it would be good to understand the ‘smart’ system a little better before I upgrade - if you read the discussion above you will see that my meter is indeed out of certification, so despite the fact I am confident it isn’t currently lying about my consumption I guess it will need replacing soon!

Happy New Year to you too!

Edit: Reading that thread again, one of the issues seems to be with the internal power supplies for the smart meter gear. If these use ‘switched-mode’ supplies for the electronics involved that can be a serious source of interference across all frequencies if they are of low quality, and I feel sure there’s a chance they will be made to the cheapest acceptable specification! I will try to find a friend or neighbour’s smart meter and do a local scan for interference!

That’s very helpful, thanks, both the teardown story and the manual link! I’ll have a good read over the next few days and decide what to do next.

Thanks @MGreenwood - very useful!

Sorry for that slight mis-interpretation, @FrancB.

I’ve just updated the topic title so hope that clears things up - Thanks for popping back with more technical info 

Today I contacted OVO to advise my traditional style electric meter has ceased recording - actually I was surprised OVO had not contacted me as the reading I gave on the 16 Jan was identical to that of 16 Dec - the call handler took all details and advised there would be a delay as they would have to source the meter - a way I was given a date of 8 Feb for fitment. Later I received an email stating “Confirmation of your smart meter fitment” - I had made it very clear during my initial discussion that I did not want a smart meter, just a straight replacement. I then recontacted OVO and this time got a different call handler, who had a gruff attitude at the least, who, after I’d explained the issue, told me I would have to have a smart meter, it was compulsory- I then advised, when I was given a chance, that I knew this not to be the case, I was then told no traditional style meters were available and even if they were it would cost me up to £500 to be fitted - not bad for a job that takes around 45 minutes ! I advised the man that I would not be having a smart meter and could he please make sure this was advised - so far I have had no reply.

Have others had similar issues and what was the result ? I know I can get a traditional meter fitted, and at a lot( more than half) less than the cost I had quoted - I’m based in the Plymouth area so if anyone has any useful contacts please advise.

There are no stocks left of traditional meters in OVO’s inventory anymore and there’s no plans to get more. This is in common with pretty much all other suppliers.

A £500 quote is about average as well. Not only would the main fuse have to be pulled at your expense, but you’d need permission from OVO to remove the existing meter and have OVO remove it at your cost (not cheap!) and get OVO’s permission to use your own meter, find one that OVO would allow you to use, buy it at your own cost, have it fitted at your own cost and have the DNO put the main fuse back in. You’re talking hundreds of pounds for this.

Or you can just accept OVO’s offer of a free one and simply ignore the data.

Plus you can also just go for Monthly readings only and have the meter NOT submit anything else except whatever the current basic meter reading is on the scheduled monthly read date. It wouldn’t include usage data, half-hourly snapshots, breakdowns… Just the current reading.

I prefer to control my energy usage myself - my usage is minimal and easy to manage.

There’s another good reason for Ofgem having that rule. Complex and exotic legacy metering setups like THTC cannot be supported for much longer and the last time just about any manufacturer made those meters was donkeys years ago.

OVO keeps a handful of such meters in inventory as spares, but they cannot be used for anyone who doesn’t explicitly need those meter types and there’s only a finite number of them left anyway. The world is moving on, so THTC is no longer suitable these days.