Serial communication is a female thing, so bear in mind that preamble are needed and some of them may say the size don't make any difference

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Usually 3-5 $AA as preamble is enough. Machester encoding have it's own advantage if you send long data packet. A checksum is also handy.
I don't think the character pacing (pause x) is really needed if you're using a slow baudrate (2400 bauds or so)
a single SEROUT/DEBUG/SEROUT2/HSEROUT line is all you need in many case.
Always make sure your crystal are accurate.
BTW which PIC are you using?
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