Ok, so what I need to do is:
1)implement the UART in SW myself instead of using a chip with built-in HW
UART
2)use Manchester code for the transmission and reception of the data
3)hack my data into n-bit packets(was going to do that anyway),no need for
frames since I only want to send one type of packet.
4)Send some kind of sync header like 00110011 or even 00110101 which will
allow me to detect packet start and sync at bit-level

That's more or less what I had come up with before looking into PIC UARTS
(w/o the Manchester code) where the hacking of data into frames(besides
my packets) complicated things with resync at the frame level(especially
since frames were delimited by single bits).
With a fixed packet length this should work ok.In sync-state you'll have the
PIC hunt for 00110101 and then enter packetread-state.At this point n bits
are read(well 2*n because of the Manchester),the packet is delivered for
processing and sync-state is entered.If an encoding violation is detected
during packetread-state read data is discarded and sync-state is entered.
This way the transmitter can just transmit packets whenever he wants to and
the receiver will sync and get them missing one or two packets at most.Does
that sound ok or am I missing something?
If that works(and if it doesn't something similar will anyway) it should be
a nice alternative to rfPICs if I can't use them for some reason.I'll have a
look at those t-codes as well.

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