Folks don't get distracted by the schematic. This can work with that schematic, or with a piece of wire from pin 2 of the PIC to pin 2 of the DB-9. The transistor and it's support resistors are not really helping anything, but not really hurting either. The problem will be in the code, or possibly a bad PIC. I remember 12 bit cores don't like SEROUT2 but I'm not sure if this device is one of these?