Troubleshooting USB GPS not detected on VenusOS / CerboGX

Your GPS is not showing on your Victron system? Here are some steps to help you fix that.

• Model of GPS receiver
• Speed of communication / baudrate

# Model of GPS receiver

First, you should now that a limited amount of GPS is supported. At the time I'm writing this article, here are the list of USB GPS supported:

• Globalsat BU353-W SiRF STAR III 4800 baud
• Globalsat ND100 SiRF STAR III 38400 baud
• Globalsat BU353S4 SiRF STAR IV 4800 baud
• Globalsat MR350 + BR305US SiRF STAR III 4800 baud

Mine is the BU353S4 and I know it should work because i'm the one that broke it.

# Speed of communication / baudrate

If like me you have used gpsd to check if the usb gps was working and after that It doesn't not show up in VenusOS anymore, it's probable a configuration problem.

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

Here is a quote from gpsd manual Limitations:

gpsd may change control settings on your GPS (such as the emission frequency of various sentences or packets) and not restore the original settings on exit. This is a result of inadequacies in NMEA and the vendor binary GPS protocols, which often do not give clients any way to query the values of control settings in order to be able to restore them later.

We will use gpsctl that comes with gpsd to force the baudrate we are interested in.

gpsctl -f /dev/tty.usbserial-14210 # Gives information about the device
gpsctl -f /dev/tty.usbserial-14210 -t SiRF -r # Reset the device
gpsctl -f /dev/tty.usbserial-14210 -n -s 4800 # Set baudrate and mode to NMEA

And voilà !