The only problem I could think of here are the non-alphabetic characters. Some of them are not present anywhere else.

This should be taken care of by the conversion table that is available for you to use. But in some cases it is missing a handle. E.g. in Java, most solutions use MorseCode map even though it is neither named in description, nor imported or used in any other way in the initial code.

Hihi ^^

Everything is spelled correctly, as far as I can see.

Thanks. Are some words misspelled in this test or should they all be spelled accurately to the word? Trying to identify what part of my algo is failing.

Yeah, it starts with something that can be seen as garbage letters, but it is not.
In fact, you can look up those 'garbage letters' in Wikipedia. :)

Having incredible difficulties on the final "hand shaking" test. Can someone please confirm that the start of this transmission is garbage letters or are my measurements off?

My translation results in gibberish interspersed with words that give me the general idea of what the message is about. Is this test supposed to yield clean words or a format like I am currently getting?

Edit: disregard, just CW servers