Usually, and the pseudo standard is, when communicating via RS-232 the communication should be in ASCii; it is also transfered in the WYSIWYG, "what you see is what you get", so if there are no charachters that you can make out,and you should be able to, then most likely you have the transfer settings incorrect. With that said, if you are certain that you have the transfer speed, parity bit, size of the byte, etc. set correctly, then the data you are receiving is valid data. Whether or not the data should be readable is dependant upon what the application is. For instance, if you had a CMUcam and you were trying to send the data to your computer, then you would require some sort of algorythm (sp?) which would assemble the data into a picture. What I am saying here is that we really need to have more information on the project. The information you have provided is not sufficent enough to troubleshoot the problem. I hope this helps you to better understand where you may be going wrong...
LF