I thought the wires and connection would be good. Ham people rarely miss anything like that.
Let me know about the code. You did not post your code, so I couldn't see if you had used a char data type. In another topic, it had caused the compiler to assign a 32 bit value. Instead of returning -1 as 0xFF (8 bit), it was being returned and displayed as 0xFFFFFFFF (32 bit) using Serial.println(). That is why the uint8_t data type instead of a char on inByte.
This is the topic:
http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,74835.0.html
Add: Insure your baud rate at the lower right corner of the IDE serial window matches the baud rate set for Serial.begin(), or it will have that garbled appearance also.