There are no specific hardware requirements for UUCP under Linux. Basically any Hayes-compatible modem works painlessly with UUCP.
In most cases, you'll want the fastest modem you can afford, i.e. 56000 bps actually. In general, you want to have a 16550 UART on your serial board or built into your modem to handle speeds of above 9600 baud.
If you don't know what that last sentence means, please consult the comp.dcom.modems group or the various fine modem & serial communications FAQs & periodic postings on USENET.
UUCP for linux is available everywhere, for example on sunsite.unc.edu. But before trying to get any version, try to install & make your current uucp work ; there're many little differences between each linux distribution, therefore it's easier for you to configure/install your distribution's UUCP package rather than editing sources for some options, setting the right paths & permissions, installing, etc.
But if you prefer sources ...
1) Unpack
To extract a gzip'd tar archive, I do the following:
gunzip -c filename.tar.z | tar xvf -
A "modern" tar can just do a:
tar -zxvf filename.tgz
2) Run "configure"
Type "sh configure".
The configure script will compile a number of test programs to see what is available on your system & will calculate many things.
The configure script will create conf.h from conf.h.in & Makefile from Makefile.in. It will also create config.status, which is a shell script which actually creates the files.
3) Decide where to install
Rather than editing the Makefile.in file in the sources you can get the same effect by:
"configure --prefix=/usr/lib"
4) Edit "policy.h" for your local system
5) Then compile & install the software
"make" to compile."make install" to install.