Thanks, that's a good idea. I decided to check the serial stream and send it back to the serial monitor. It seemed to be receiving the characters fine. Then I checked the function I was using before again and it was still not working.
The problem was with the Serial.readstring() function, for whatever reason (maybe those outlined in robin2's tutorial).
I had success with using cstrings instead and the following crude statements:
int check = 1;
int i = 0;
while (check){
char c = Serial1.read();
if(c == Str3[i]){
i++;
}
if(i==(strlen(Str3)-1)){
check = 0;
}
}
check = 1;