Hi sccoupe,

I'm not a big serial comm user although I'm working on a project using serial now, but from reading alot of posts over the past few years, I think the big feature of using a usart over serin/serout is that the usart runs in the background and you can use interupts and polling to let you know when data is present in the usarts registers. Take some time and search the forums for more information.

HTH,

BobK