DSI has experience using the typical shoe box sized cages but more and more customers are finding that lab space is difficult to come by.  Many different configurations are possible depending on the animal model and space available.  As a rule of thumb, always leave at a minimum the distance of one RPC-1 (~12 inches or 31cm) between cages.  The best case situation would be placing each cage two receiver widths (18 inches or 45 cm) away from each other.  Excluding pair housing studies, below is an example of the minimum recommended small animal configuration without any shielding:

As shown above, stagger the cages on a shelf to conserve the most space with this single frequency device.  This illustration represents one implanted animal in each cage paired with another animal that is not implanted. With the HD-S11-F2 device, it is possible to pair two implanted animals with different frequency implants in the same cage and gather data simultaneously.  The RPC-3 receiver is mandatory for pair housing studies and requires the same amount of distance between cages as that of the RSC-1 (~12 inches or 31cm).

Learn how to monitor small animals in cages with larger dimensions.