One more quick question and I think my project will be done. Thanks for all of your help. Without it I wouldn't have been anywhere near this far.
The last hurdle is the scan channel indicator. Normally all data is sent as ASCII equivalent in hex so is directly displayed properly when printed to the lcd directly. However, the channel scan is sent as 0x01 for channel one and 0x02 for ch 2 etc... instead of 0x31, 0x32 etc... I know this should be a simple task but for some reason I can't seem to get it to display properly. I have tried the various format extensions such as DEC etc...