Those spring antennae are utter garbage. I use solid core wire from ethernet cable for antennae.
I would also try swapping in different transmitter and receiver modules. Yours looks like a good receiver (is that a SYN470 IC on there? Those work very well); I didn't try any transmitters with an IC in SOIC-8 package when I was testing these, so can't comment on that.
Also, try touching the two antennae together, and see if that works.