[daltore]

You could always try good ol' "\n" and/or "\r". I'm not quite certain of the setup you have, but you might be able to use a system() command to pass the word "ASTRAL" through the echo command.

If nothing else works, there's always the down-and-dirty last-resort method of sending raw data to the serial port through "outb". This is a Linux C command, and I'm not sure if it works in any other OS's/C derivatives, but there's probably something similar. Note that this function only passes one byte on at a time, so you'd have to find something else that can pass whole strings at the correct baud rate.