This paper proposes the integration of multiple antenna technologies with compressed sensing algorithms to facilitate wireless multiple-access from smart meters to a central base station in smart grid home area networks. This integration is made possible by new precoding weight designs which utilize the multiple antennas for either achieving multiplexing or providing power-gain. For the multiplexing scheme, we show that the use of multiple antennas can significantly reduce the delay, particularly at high signal-to-noise ratios. For the power-gain scheme, we demonstrate that the use of multiple antennas enhances the performance of the compressed sensing algorithm by reducing the impact of unwanted noise, leading to a lower delay. Finally, we compare our distributed scheme with a carrier sense multiple-access scheme, and show that our scheme achieves a lower average delay for even a small number of transmitting nodes.