Distributed sensing for water quality monitoring provides important data that can be used to evaluate the characteristics of water according to specific requirements. The measurement of water parameters in extended areas requires the utilization of a high number of sensing nodes including multiple sensors, which can make difficult the management of the sensing devices to obtain high reliability of the system. The work presents a solution of autonomous water quality measuring nodes that puts together elements from the IEEE1451.X standard for smart sensors and UHF RFID technology. The novelty of the implemented solution is the utilization of a Virtual Transducer Electronic Data Sheet and an RFID based selection of the individual sensing channel characteristics. Hardware design and implementation are described in the paper.