Serial console (sc) does away with all the cruft found in typical serial teminal emulation programs. It should provide straight-forward access to any serial device on a host, and enable you to send characters to a connected device and see it's responses.
Please use the Sourceforge project page to access source code and binaries.
The man page is part of the packages, and also available here in text format or in HTML format.
A few mailing lists are available. Please see the Sourceforge page for details.