NRF24l01p are great little ships. I managed to send data with it at almost 200m. But strangely did not see any big difference in range when using advanced version with PA+LNA on board..
When working with it from Serial port connection, it is useful to use some more advances RS232 serial terminal program such as http://docklight.de/ to be able to read and send binary formatted data (not only ascii) since amount of data per package is very limited.