strange communication behavior on Lilypad connection

Hello, all,

My fiancee and I are prototyping some electronics for a wearable, and we've got a Lilypad board with a Lilypad XBee breakout. We're trying to read the XBee's RSSI pin and get some distance information from it. We've got both the boards temporarily mounted on foam pads, with alligator clips as connections until we get things figured out. We also have an Arduino Fio running a second XBee, but it is working fine.

The problem we're having is that we seem to have a very strange connection to the RSSI pin on the XBee breakout. We can see the RSSI pin on the breakout lighting up appropriately as the XBee receives data, but we seem to pull 0 from it often. There are two things that seem to fix the 0s: one is holding our hands over the Lilypad and XBee breakout. The other is partially unclipping the alligator clip attached to the XBee breakout.

We've checked that we didn't scratch off all the conductive stuff on the XBee breakout or Lilypad, and it seems to be just fine. We're just totally mystified by this behavior. Anyone got ideas or experience with this kind of oddness?

First question that comes to mind is what do you intend to do with the RSSI value? It is NOT a reliable indicator of distance.