Yeah, thanks. I've had very poor luck with SoftSerial in the past so will try different things. I do have 1284 boards with 2 UARTs. Also, I did get the little BT dongles to pair with my tablet, and talk to terminal emulators a couple of days ago, but the AT cmds didn't fully work [only the 'OK' part], plus they won't intercommunicate, so I need to wring that all out. It's always a muckaround with this stuff.