Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)

I'm having problems with the extended ascii characters in the range 128-159. I'm working with SQL server environment using java. I originally had problems with characters in the range 128-159 when I did a 'select char_col from my_table' I always get junk when I try to retreive it from the ResultSet using the code 'String str = rs.getString(1)'. For example char_col would have the ascii character (in hex) '0x83' but when I retrieved it from the database, my str equaled '0x192'. I'm aware there is a gap in the range 128-159 in ISO-8859-1 charset. I've tracked the problem to be a charset issue converting the extended ascii characters in ISO-8859-1 into java's unicode charset.

I looked on the forum and it said to try to specify the charset when I retreived it from the resultset so I did 'String str = new String(rs.getBytes(), "ISO-8859-1")' and it was able to read the characters 128-159 correctly except for five characters (129, 141, 143, 144, 157). These characters always returned the character 63 or 0x3f. Does anyone who what's happening here? How come these characters didn't work? Is there a workaround this? I need to use only use java and its default charsets and I don't want to switch to the windows Cp1252 charset cuz I'm using the java code in a unix environment as well.

thanks.
-B