@techknight Thanks for your reply it is appreciated - Sorry for the late reply - got attacked by the "Man Flu". For anyone following the thread what I've learnt.
The Pi has two serial ports - one of which is fully featured and one that is only TX and RX
on the older Pi's the full-featured one went to the Serial port pins
on the new Pi's the full-featured serial port is used for the Bluetooth and the simple ones go to the Serial port pins
You can disable the Bluetooth and switch the full serial port back to the Serial port
To enable the Serial port you have to edit
/boot/config.txt and add
enable_uart=1 at the end
To disable the Bluetooth and switch the UARTS
also add
dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt
Then reboot
This then gave me the /dev/ttyAMA0 which I could use
I also stopped the bluetooth service with
sudo systemctl disable hciuart
It did basically work but I was missing some characters sometimes so then opted not to disable the Bluetooth and use the simple UART
in this case, I can see two UARTS
/dev/ttyAMA0 and
/dev/ttyS0
Using the device /dev/ttyS0 then works
Jon