I've got a string of 5 $AA preceeeding the READY, and haven't seemed to have much of a problem getting the data to the receiver - i send the data 5 times on a transmission to make fairly sure it gets through. I've got the timeout at 1ms toggling an LED to indicate to me when it's exiting out of the serin command - it's way random tho can tripout every half second or every 10 minutes. The issue I have is not so much transmitting the data - it's when no data is being transmitted