What are the wave characteristics for the detected gravitational wave? I'm curious to know what the amplitude and wavelength of the detected gravitational waves are? The paper mentions some characteristics of the detection event, but not what that means for the wave itself.
Additionally, I'm curious what the theoretical limit of this detection technique as it relates to the gravitational wave characteristics. How short does the wavelength need to be? How large the amplitude?
 A: As reported in the article in PRL, the detected gravitational waves swept up in frequency from around 35 to 250 Hz. Since GWs propagate at the speed of light, the corresponding wavelength ($ \lambda = c / f$) is $8.6 \cdot 10^{6}$ to $1.2 \cdot 10^{6}$ meter.
Note that the frequency did not increase any further (since the black holes merged at some point), so the wavelength did not get any shorter than this. There is however no upper limit to the wavelength, since the two black holes were initially orbiting each other at huge distances with periods measured in micro-Hertz. It might have taken a billion years before they lost enough energy due to GW and could finally merge! Most of this was however outside the sensitive detection band of LIGO, so it could only observe the last 0.2 second.
Some day, they hope to measure the earlier part of the inspirals with space-based detectors like the LISA mission, which are sensitive to lower frequencies. In the best case, you could see an inspiral slowly sweeping through the LISA frequencies for a few months, disappear for some time (since there is a gap in sensitivity) and finally see it reappear in the LIGO band to witness the final few seconds and the merger!
The peak amplitude of the gravitational strain was $1.0 \cdot 10^{-21}$ when the frequency was around 150 Hz.
