Wildbill, The current baud rate is set at 9600 (usual n,8,1). I'm used to selecting slower baud rates to compensate for noise in the comms signal and other data issues. I will try your suggestion of increasing baud rate. My VB application on the PC is happy with either Ascii or Binary (MSComm Control).
Is there an easy function to transmit serial as binary from the arduino.
I'm one of those idiots still using good old VB on a 64 bit win7 machine. Who said it cant be done (even though it really shouldn't be). MS .Net really needed a tool like the ActiveX development tool so it was quick and easy to build components, its now like programming in hexadecimal - I want a quick interface application in 5 mins not write war and peace.