Wide area communications network for remote data generating stations

A data collection system for data collection from a plurality of meters comprising:

• a) a plurality of telemetry devices, each of the telemetry devices being associated with a selected meter and including;
• i) a sensor to measure a parameter at a series of measurement time to generate a series of successive measurements,
• ii) a first memory configured to store a plurality of measurements from said series of successive measurements, and
• iii) a transmitter to transmit said plurality of stored measurements to a collection device at a series of transmission times, each of said stored measurements transmitted at a plurality of different transmission times;
• and
• b) a plurality of collection devices, there being fewer collection devices than telemetry devices, said collection devices including;
• i) a receiver to receive transmissions from a subset of said plurality of telemetry devices,
• ii) a processor for extracting said series of successive measurements from a series of said transmissions and analyzing said series of successive measurements to generate a metered function of said parameter, the processor for comparing a message number of the current transmission to a message number of the previous transmission,
• iii) a second memory configured to store data representing telemetry devices from which the respective collection device receives transmissions, the data storing a receipt time of a previous transmission from said telemetry device,
• iv) a clock for determining a receipt time of a current transmission from a telemetry device, and
• v) a transmitter to transmit said metered function to a monitoring station.