Review on Black GlobalSat BU-353-S4 USB GPS Receiver by Joe Gosa

UPDATE - after some time of use they started giving me time in 1905 via GPSD. Reboot has been giving me the correct date for a while. I've tried going back to the script I wrote below, but the receiver no longer responds or sends any data. However, it works fine with gpsd until the date changes. Apart from generating useless data, it works perfectly. Based on the questions I've seen, I'm not sure if we're talking about the same device. The one I have plugs into a USB port at 4800 baud (and some other well-documented attributes). A driver is required to read serial data from the USB port. After installing the driver, any application can read the data. I wrote a python script that opens the device (on Linux) and reads "suggestions". There are two considerations: the first is that the initial read can be the middle byte/middle of a sentence, so the reader should stay in sync with the stream, which is not difficult given the second consideration that each sentence ends with two newlines is. . You sync by reading until you get a full line starting with "$". I can read data from the receiver with "cat", there is no other magic. The receiver generates a typical set of four NMEA sentences, but unfortunately no header sentence. I like that the antennas are magnetic despite being bulky.