Modbus rtu - Serial UART - Understanding some basics

There are many descriptions of Modbus RTU on the web, much more comprehensive then any answer here.

Yes. However I would suggest even if you are sending the same known message, it would be better to use one of the many Modbus libraries, e.g ModbusMaster, then you would not have to worry about message formatting, and it will also do things like check for valid responses.