FWIW On the AAA batteries in the Panasonic cordless phones,

i have received the new batteries and the telephone reception is still about the worst i have ever heard in my whole life, possibly longer!

Nothing to do with wrongly charging batteries, - which have admittedly been kept and always charged in the handsets throughout their lives.

There is a problem I didnt mention, which is that the base station became flooded and stopped charging its handset a few years ago. So we carried on using the external handsets for charging, which worked OK for a few years. Then the problems began when we moved the units to a new home. SO either the corroding from the flood which destroyed the base station charging circuits has now (eg) got into pots all over the whole circuit board OR the new home cant handle a 1.9 GHz setup? There is unfortunately a 15% chance of this!

So I checked the reviews for these DECT units, noted which gave supposedly lousy reception and bought cheaply another one in a model which gets generally good reception reviews.

[Is someone going to advise that these similar units from the same manufacturer with different features all have the same basic circuitry and in reality all give the same performance anyway? And that the real problem may be that some homes handle 1.9 better while other homes handle 2.4 or 5.8, - or even 900 better?]