I don't see any significant advantage in using Hard UART except for increased cost on hardware and size of hardware. Whats the harm in handling one device at a time and putting others on hold using handshake as in my scheme.......

- Even with hard UART you can't go on accepting data from all 10 devices. If all of them are transmiting simultaneously at high speed say 57.6 Kbps or something then within no time your resources will be over since sending is through single channel on PC comm port. In that event your scheme may totally fail if you can't stop the reception of data by handshaking controls.

"hard" UARTs af any use have FIFOs in them, thus, no problem with handlimg multiple transmit.receives simultaneously.

Erik