Credit transfer system for a utility company to transfer data from supplier to consumers' meters

摘要

Financial data such as prepaid credit data is transmitted to remote consumer meters from a central station using radio data transmissions. At the central station messages consisting of meter addresses and the credit data for the customer concerned are recovered by a controller from memory and transmitted to the meter locations. The transmissions are received at the meter stations and, if the address data of a message matches the meter network address coded in the meter, the credit data for the meter is stored in the meter memory. If this sounds familiar, similar systems are known for the updating of postal rate data in remotely updated postal rate meters (franking machines).