Bi0H4z4rD - thank you, that was very helpful. Appending the serial port number to the "serial" command was not obvious in the documentation. This will be much better than software serial.
What's the cleanest way to setup a communication task with serial put to the side while the main loop is running? Or does this happen by default already? My concern is that the serial task will be much slower than the main program.
Thank you.