  Energy meter reading is a monotonous and an expensive task. Now the meter
reader people goes to each meter and take the meter reading manually to issue
the bill which will later be entered in the billing software for billing and
payment automation. If the manual meter reading and bill data entry process can
be automated then it would reduced the laborious task and financial wastage.
"Automatic Electric Meter Reading (AMR) System" is a metering system that is to
be used for data collecting from the meter and processing the collected data
for billing and other decision purposes. In this paper we have proposed an
automatic meter reading system which is low cost, high performance, highest
data rate, highest coverage area and most appropriate for Bangladesh
perspective. In this AMR system there are four basic units. They are reading
unit, communication unit, data receiving and processing unit and billing
system. For reading unit we identified the disk rotation of the energy meter
and stored the data in microcontroller. So it is not required to change the
current analog energy meter. An external module will be added with the current
energy meter. In the communication unit Wimax transceiver was used for wireless
communication between meter end and the server end because of its wide coverage
area. In the data receiving and processing unit meter reading will be collected
from the transceiver which is controlled by another microcontroller. There will
be a computer application that will take the data from the microcontroller.
This will also help to avoid any tampering or break down of energy meter. There
are various AMR system exists all over the world. Those systems were analyzed
and we found they are not feasible for Bangladesh.
