CrossRoads:
No no no!
You've got faster hardware in the '328 doing the monitoring - just need to figure out how to use it.
I'll look at the links in a minute, but I note from the datasheet pages you quoted:
; Enable SPI, Master, set clock rate fck/16
ldi r17,(1<<SPE)|(1<<MSTR)|(1<<SPR0)
out SPCR,r17
It's interesting, isn't it, that in their own example code they slow down the clock to fck/16?
In my code example I had this:
// Slow down the master a bit
SPI.setClockDivider(SPI_CLOCK_DIV8);
I got away with slowing the master down to 1/8 clock, they showed 1/16 in the example code.