I cant assign a start and end character because the module returns many different responses depending on circumstance and they can be different lengths.
I did indeed screw up the bit vs byte indexing, and this is what is causing my issue with this test code. I made the changes and I can now write the bytes to EEPROM which I can read. I now have to figure out how to send those bytes as a string out the USB port, unless I do they byte to text conversion on the PC side.