Can't send commands through serial transmitters.

I bought a pair, transmitter and receiver. They use simple serial communication and they are passive devices. I want to turn an LED on and off from one Arduino controlling a transmitter to another Arduino controlling a receiver. The receiving end is supposed to turn an LED on if it detects a signal. However in the transmitter I don't understand how to send the data, Serial.print("on");, isn't the best because it sends text, I don't know how to use text as a form of communicating a command to the other Arduino.

SReceiver_.pde (229 Bytes)

STransmitter.pde (91 Bytes)

point 1 - use the code button to quote code snippets.

point 2 '=' is not a string equality operator, its an assignment operator. '==' is the equality operator but it doesn't work for strings either - you need to use the library function 'strcmp' (see previous thread on this issue: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1203585411)

I still don't understand. Basically I'm making a basic remote control for an LED. If you could write some example code for the 'if' statement that could help. Thanks!

They use simple serial communication and they are passive devices

How can a transmitter be "passive"?

Your code sends a string, receives a single character, but tries to compare against another string.

Why not just use a simple one or zero?