How to check if a USB GPS Receiver is working on macOS

I have a GPS receiver connected to VenusOS. It's a bit of last minute thing that I added to my system and the problem is it's not ideally placed. So I had to check on my mac if it was still working.

First, you will need gpsd. A well coded unix tool to deal with GPS receiver

brew install gpsd

Then find your GPS receiver. It should appear as a USB serial device.

ls /dev/tty.usb*

Launch gpsd with the usb receiver as a parameter

gpsd /dev/tty.usbserial-14210 -p

Launch cgps to see the data woming in live !
You also hae xgps on linux for a graphical interface.

cgps

And voilà !

Like you can see on my screenshot, my receiver works but can't have a fix where it's palced. So I moved around until I found a place with good reception.

When you finished with debugging, kill the deamons 😈 !

killall -9 gpsd

If you wanna learn more on gpsd or on GPS in general, I recommend using man gpsd. There is so much good informations in there !