Trying to pass a char to software serial with a button press Good day everyone,
I'm returning to the Arduino world after my a 3 year hiatus following the birth of my son.

I'm trying to push a button connected to pin 2 and have that send a 'd' to SoftwareSerial on pins 10,11. This should trigger an output back from the device connected to the SoftwareSerial.

I'm encountering an issue:

When I press the button it sends about 15 d's. I would like to limit this to just one char per button press, I attempted to build an if statement but it seems to ignore the conditions.

#include &lt;SoftwareSerial.h&gt;
// software serial #1: TX = digital pin 10, RX = digital pin 11
SoftwareSerial portOne(10, 11);
const int buttonPin = 2;     // the number of the pushbutton pin
const int ledPin =  13;      // the number of the LED pin

// variables will change:
int buttonState = 0;         // variable for reading the pushbutton status
int button1State = 0;

// the setup function runs once when you press reset or power the board
void setup() {
// initialize digital pin 13 as an output.
  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
  Serial.begin(9600);
  while (!Serial) {
    ; // wait for serial port to connect. Needed for native USB port only
  }

  // Start each software serial port
  portOne.begin(4800);
  while (!portOne) {
    ; // wait for serial port to connect. Needed for native USB port only
  }
}

// the loop function runs over and over again forever
void loop() {
  int Once = 0;
  buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);

  // check if the pushbutton is pressed.
  // if it is, the buttonState is HIGH:
  if (buttonState == HIGH ) { 
    if (Once == 0) {
      Once = 1;
      // turn LED on:
      digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
      // send D to Radio
      portOne.write("d");
      Serial.write("d");
      Serial.print(Once);
      Serial.println();
      delay(1);
    }
  }
  else (buttonState == LOW) {
    // turn LED off:
    Once = 0;

    digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);

  }
  portOne.listen();
  // while there is data coming in, read it
  // and send to the hardware serial port:
  while (portOne.available() &gt; 0) {
    char inByte = portOne.read();
    Serial.print(inByte);
  }
}
As pointed out by Edgar you should debounce the button. Perhaps increasing the delay() should do the trick. 

Try with 100-200 milliseconds.

With this edit you can delete Once unless you are planning on using it somewhere else.