I made some progress tonight. I've been doing a bunch of research on various settings for the PIC18 series chips such as what the various fuses are and how to get it to run with the internal oscillator and use PLL (phase locked loop) to multiply the clockspeed by 4 to get a total of 32MHz. I had thrown together some code last week and uploaded it to the chip, but when I tested it, the LED didn't seem to blink. When I tried the program in a SPICE simulator, it seemed to run ok, so I wasn't sure what was wrong. I fixed my power supply, from which the voltage regulator had been resoldered numerous times had finally detached for the last time, by simply replacing it and wire-tying it to the board better. I hooked up the circuit and still it didn't blink. I couldn't locate my logic probe to test it, so I decided to try hooking it up to my oscilloscope. I was pleasantly surprised to see a square-wave pattern on the screen. What had happened was when I threw the test program together, I made a delay routine that just simply ran from 1 to 10000, which was simply too fast to visibly show up on the LED. With a bunch of testing and using the "stopwatch" portion of MPLAB, I was finally able to make a fairly accurate delay routine, which now works. I'm working on making the pseudocode (which is nothing more than a step by step description in english about how the program runs) for a program that will decode the PPM signals from the receiver and somehow transmit them back to the arduino (either via I²C, SPI or possibly analog output). I just love the irony of having a project that uses a PIC chip and an Atmel chip (2 major competitors) together.