Thanx all for the info on the antenna. I looked in the recever and
found the antena is *gasp* about 6.5 inches long!!! It is bent inside
the case into a square. So if I was to straighten and piont it straght
up would this help with range? Is the reason it is bent inside just to
hide and make the recever smaller or is it somehowe helping the
recever be omnidirectional? Agian - thanx for all the input!!!
KEith





[snip]

You may be better off putting a better antenna at the receiver end. The
optimum would be a 1/4 wavelength. Hey, anybody out there remember the
damn equation for this... 300,000 meters per second devided by
something-or-other???

A wavelength of 1 meter is a frequency of 300 MHz.

So 433 MHz will have a wavelength of (300/433) meters, or 9/13 meters.

A 1/4-wave antenna would be (1/4)*(9/13) meters long, which is 9/52
meters long -- which is just a teeny bit longer than 9/54 meters,
and that's 1/6 of a meter, or (1/6)* 39.37 inches, or just a smidgen
over 6.5 inches long -- and all that assumes I did the arithmetic
right. Since I'm a math jock, there's no guarantee I did, so check it
yourselves.

I just fired up the 4-banger calculator, and it tells me that the
1/4-wave antenna should be 6.819+ inches long, so 6.5 is a good
ballpark figure.