My basic question then seems to be this, after a bit of thought...


All that can be transmitted over the serial link are binary bytes. Whether these bytes are interpereted as ascii character codes or as raw values depends on how they are interpreted at the receive end.

For instance, the MICRostudio program bundled with the compiler has a serial coms window. You can type text to be sent over the link into the console.

If you type "hello world" I would assume you are sending 11 bytes, one for the ASCII code of each character in the string. If however you type "32" what are you sending? The string '32' - i.e two bytes representing the character 3 and the character 2, or the value '32' in one binary byte ...