Bluetooth mate silver not responding in passthrough

Hello,
I just received a bluetooth mate silver and I'm trying to set it up to pair with a bluetooth tablet. I hooked it up to my arduino uno (clone) and I'm running a passthrough sketch I found on sparkfun. (Incidentally, what is the best way to paste the code in here?) The sketch is supposed to set the baud rate to 9600 and enable passthrough commands.

Connections are Tx to Uno D2, Rx to Uno D3

The light flashes continuously at 2 Hz indicating readiness to enter command mode. When I open the serial monitor in the arduino IDE and type $$$ nothing happens. The serial monitor is set to no line ending and 9600 baud.

Any ideas what I might be doing wrong, or how to troubleshoot?

OK, so an update: If I alter the passthrough sketch to set up the serial monitor and bluetooth at 115200 baud, I can enter command mode and get a response! the settings command ("D") returns some scrambled characters though so its useless.

When I change the serial.begin and bluetooth.begin back to 9600, nothing works again. any ideas?

here is the code that I altered:

/*
Example Bluetooth Serial Passthrough Sketch
by: Jim Lindblom
SparkFun Electronics
date: February 26, 2013
license: Public domain

This example sketch converts an RN-42 bluetooth module to
communicate at 9600 bps (from 115200), and passes any serial
data between Serial Monitor and bluetooth module.
*/
#include <SoftwareSerial.h>

int bluetoothTx = 2; // TX-O pin of bluetooth mate, Arduino D2
int bluetoothRx = 3; // RX-I pin of bluetooth mate, Arduino D3

SoftwareSerial bluetooth(bluetoothTx, bluetoothRx);

void setup()
{

Serial.begin(115200); // Begin the serial monitor at 9600bps
/*
bluetooth.begin(115200); // The Bluetooth Mate defaults to 115200bps
bluetooth.print("$"); // Print three times individually
bluetooth.print("$");
bluetooth.print("$"); // Enter command mode
delay(100); // Short delay, wait for the Mate to send back CMD
bluetooth.println("U,9600,N"); // Temporarily Change the baudrate to 9600, no parity
// 115200 can be too fast at times for NewSoftSerial to relay the data reliably

*/

bluetooth.begin(115200); // Start bluetooth serial at 9600

}

void loop()
{

if(bluetooth.available()) // If the bluetooth sent any characters
{
// Send any characters the bluetooth prints to the serial monitor
Serial.print((char)bluetooth.read());
}
if(Serial.available()) // If stuff was typed in the serial monitor
{
// Send any characters the Serial monitor prints to the bluetooth
bluetooth.print((char)Serial.read());
}

// and loop forever and ever!

}

I think I've figured it out.

I commented out all the lines trying to automatically set command mode and baud rate in the sketch

I put it into command mode with the serial port at 115200 and the bluetooth at 115200. I then entered "U,9600,N" to put the bluetooth module into 9600 baud mode temporarily. I then edited the sketch to open the serial rate at 9600 and bluetooth.begin to 9600, and the was able to access information from the module. I was then able to pair with my tablet.