Yes I know the pins are different. I am basing it on the fact that it used to work until a cat pulled it off the desk by the cord which caused me to grab the cat, move him and pick up the mega and radio, after which it stopped working (previously working code with previously working wiring now said unable to communicate with radio) either from the fall or ESD or a short caused by the landing I'm not sure, but the temp/pressure/humidity sensor and photo resisters still work, just the radio no longer works. Then after switching radios with the Uno, the results were as I said, leading me to believe both that radio and possibly those pins on the Mega are bad. Using the dynamic tx and dynamic rx code from the library the unit transmitted "hello" and a random number just as the code told it to and the radio received it fine. My problem was then getting it to transmit my data variables instead.
Radio would be convenient since this is intended to be the first piece of a larger system for automated garden watering, so sticking radio controlled arduinos around the yard and such would be easier. On the other hand recently lousy weather around here reminded my how bad radio interference gets whenever we get a storm, which is often. Normally I'm not fond of wireless, a hard line is always more reliable, but maybe that's just the old tech in me and I probably have a spool of cat 5 somewhere and rj45's with the crimper in my toolbox. If I stick an Ethernet shield on the Mega I could still use it as I would no longer need the possibly bad pin area, and could write the code to write the values to an ini file on the Ethernet shield's SD card which would be easy to work with.
So it boils down to which is more of a pain, burying cable or fighting stubborn radio code. I want to get another Uno anyway for a gardening watering unit anyway so I could get a shield for the Mega and another set of radios to have on for a spare. That's the direction I'm leaning