GlobalSat BU-353 gps receiver

Product details on the vendor's web page.

Well, this is my first experience with GPS receivers, so I am not in a position to compare performance with any other receiver. The general opinion, from the countless reviews in the Net, is that is very sensitive and fast to fix the position.

My intention is to use the receiver with my Eee PC 901 in the rare occasions when I need a GPS navigator or rather as a small home project.

First impressions: smaller than what I was expecting from the pictures, reasonable length of the cable (1.5 m), time to fix from cold start 15~20 minutes from inside the room in my apartment and about 4~5 minutes in a car.

Under Windows XP the initial setup is quite simple. There is a small standard tool provided on the installation disk "GPS Info" that can connect to the virtual serial COM port and communicate with the receiver - excellent to check on the status of the module.

Under Linux, most probably you will need "gpsd" to communicate with the device. I have installed "GPSDrive" from synaptic that has also pulled all the necessary dependencies including gpsd.

WARNING:(read this before you experiment yourself). I have used EeeBuntu 2.0 that has the necessary modules but for one or another reason does not starts the gpsd daemon when you insert the USB. This is not a serious problem, since as user one can easily start the program with: gpsd -bnN -D 2 /dev/ttyUSB0 . DO NOT forget the "-b" OPTION!!! From the gpsd man page

-b

Broken-device-safety, otherwise known as read-only mode. Some popular bluetooth and USB receivers lock up or become totally inaccessible when probed or reconfigured. This switch prevents gpsd from writing to a receiver. This means that gpsd cannot configure the receiver for optimal performance, but it also means that gpsd cannot break the receiver. A better solution would be for bluetooth to not be so fragile. A platform independent method to identify serial-over-bluetooth devices would also be nice.

And this is the whole story... I have managed to lock my device the very first time I have tested it under Linux (didn't use the "-b" option). It became almost inaccessible. "GPS Info" was showing garbled output while the led remained off. I have almost accepted the damage since 5 minutes without power did not help. A suggestion on the net says that it needs 72 hours to drain completely and reset. The better solution: Under Linux, start gsmd with the "-b" option. Then connect to the the daemon by "telnet localhost 2947" and then type "n=0" to set the sirf-III chip or firmware to output NMEA strings only. Here is the original post of the solution.

The common tools, to get some info from the GPS receiver under Linux are:

xgps: simple test client for gpsd with an X interface. It displays current GPS position/time/velocity information and (for GPSes that support the feature) the locations of accessible satellites.

cgps: client resembling xgps, but without the pictorial satellite display and able to run on a serial terminal or terminal emulator.

as well as xgpsspeed, gpxlogger, cgpxlogger etc.