Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi, I'm new to these forums, and I'm hoping that someone can solve this problem...

To make things short:

I have DD-wrt set up on a router.

I'm trying to run a script in CRON that fetches the daily password from my database using SSH.

CRON is set like so(in web interface):

Code:

* * * * * root /tmp/root/password-query >/tmp/root/log 2>&1

(I set it to run every minute so I could constantly test it)

And the script goes something like this:

Code:

#!/bin/sh 
export SQL_QUERY="SELECT code FROM wireless WHERE id=1;" 
export REMOTE_COMMAND="mysql -u login --password=xxxxxxxx squid -e '$SQL_QUERY' | tail -c 11" 
export DROPBEAR_PASSWORD="xxxxxxxx" 
export CODE=`/usr/bin/ssh user@xx.xx.xx.xx "$REMOTE_COMMAND"` 
echo "Done" 
echo $CODE 
nvram set wl0_wpa_psk=$CODE 
nvram commit

And run from the command line it DOES SET THE CODE, because it outputs to the log file:
"Done
xxxxxxxx
"

When cron DOES run, the code in nvram is blank and the log file looks like this:
"Done

"

If I change the backticks to quotes and output $CODE, it's exactly the what I want. I have been spending about 8 hours trying to figure this out. What is happening and how can I fix it?

Reward to whoever can suggest a fix: status as a diety
Thanks so much in advance

What I do know:
> The script is executable
> Cron is running and it does run the script every minute and shown by the log file output