It's the dumb sort of thing they'd do... but I'm not sure. The spec that comes with them isn't very clear - it just lists the parameters for PAL and NTSC side by side and underneath it has 50mW 200mW. I read it as different power for Europe vs. US. With the measured current draw at around 60mA the whole unit consumes about half a Watt.

I just traced out the cct. and there's only two transistors, one I think (BC846) as an audio sub-carrier osc. and the other (2SC64226) as the UHF output osc. What are you like at RF design? It's not my strongest area. The emitter resistor for the output stage looked a bit high (220R) so I put in 100R instead. It seems to have increased the range a bit, but nothing dazzling. Maybe its the printed inductor in the collector load that determines the power - I'm not really sure. Can you believe they got this down to two transistors though! It would be nice to come up with a hack to get the range up to that of the Tank R/C