here to confuse everyones eyes again with my PLE watermarks!

Ive been working through the med lab scene. The modelling went ok. but its more for the texturing/lighting/rendering that I want to learn. I spent the day yesterday agonisingly sorting out uvs, and I have a question.

When you apply a texture to check the uv layout, i.e, the checkerboard pattern, as seems to be popular and that I used for this, when I see other peoples work, the squares on the checker pattern are always very small and very neat. The squares on mine, lay fine enough, square edges generally running at 90 degrees, but the squares are huge!!. Does this mean that my uv's arent laid out well enough, or is there a way to scale down the texture so that the pattern is more identifiable?