I just got this thing working. The interference that I was looking for wasnt there. I hooked up the scope looking for noise and realized that I wasnt looking at a TTL signal. After some research on how exactly rs232 works, I found that a Max232 chip was required for the conversion, luckily a guy at work had one. So, Im going to order some 16F688's so that the built in uart and internal 8mhz crystal minimize my components and get the job done.