On Sat, 25 Jan 2020 17:43:42 -0800, "Paul Hovnanian P.E."
wrote:

No model or FCC ID number anywhere on this thing (it's Chinese).

Lovely. So much for FCC type certification. Probably arrived in the
US by the back door.

Either on
the outside, it the battery compartment or internally.

The label is suppose to be plainly visible on the outside of the unit.

What appears to be
the receiver section has a sticker on it that reads '929.6125'. Taking a
wild gues that this is MHz, that puts it in a pager band.

Yep, that's a pager frequency. Probably USA Mobility running Flex,
not POCSAG:
https://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Paging
Are you near one of these cities? If so, I might be able to find the
location of the local paging transmiters using 929.6125 Mhz.

Ambient support is pretty much defunct. Although they do seem to be
broadcasting updates.

Yep. Over the years, I've bought quite a bit of weather station
related stuff from them.

The weather updates are not coming from Ambient. They're coming from
some service that uses the paging frequencies for distribution. Pager
users are usually (not always) expected to pay for such added
services. My guess(tm) is that data originates from the NOAA "Weather
Wire" or EMWIN satellite feed:
https://www.weather.gov/nwws/
https://www.weather.gov/emwin/
Probably not EMWIN as it was suppose to roll over and die on December
2, 2019.

Yeah. One bar most of the time. Although I did try an interesting
experiment. I took the thing with me in my car and drove to the neighborhood
grocery store. One bar pretty much everywhere except for one location about
a block from my house. The signal strength meter pegs in front of one house.

I suspect the reason it pegs is the house has a 900 MHz wireless
headset or telephone in use. The receiver in your 7 day forecaster
box is probably fairly crude and might have a rather wide band front
end. If you have anything handy that will belch 900 MHz, see if it
registers on the bar graph.

I'm toying with the idea of putting together a spectrum analyzer app for my
SDR dongle and sniffing around for spurious sources around that frequency.

That should work. You can also decode the FLEX 3200(?) data:
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tag/flex/
I use my modified Radio Shock scanner and Linux laptop running
Mulimon-NG:
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tag/multimon-ng/
https://github.com/EliasOenal/multimon-ng
I have a pile of RTL-SDR dongles that I use mostly for monitoring
aircraft ADS-B transmissions:
https://flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/JeffLiebermann

I'm wondering about the difference in performance between your friends
unit and yours. My guess(tm) is that there's something wrong with
your receiver section. Open it up and look for a disconnected antenna
connection. If you have a service monitor, try tuning the receiver
for best performance. Maybe replace the antenna with a length of coax
and RF connector so that you can attach an external antenna.


--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558