Gamma762 had spoke in my FT8 thread about the "VK172" USB GPS receiver.
Since their under $10 on e-bay I ordered a couple to play with.

They came in and I plugged one int my Windows PC and the drivers loaded automatically and it shows
up as a com port. To my pleasant surprise they use the typical GPS format and output a 9600 baud.

I loaded up VirtualGPSView and it recognized it and works good. I did need to put the
GPS receiver on an extension cable and place in in a window but that was to be expected.

Pretty impressive for under $10

Thanks to Gamma762 for letting us know about them.

Damn - plug-and-play GPS for under 10 bucks...

Pair it with that Raspberry Pi that's been gathering dust in the closet for 2 years, and...

It takes a bit more to setup on Linux but yes for under $10 is a great find

Good times, good times!

I was surprised that even when I took it out of the window it was still seeing some sattilites.

IIRC it was plug and play on linux, the only thing I had to do was put in a couple of command line statements to tell the time service to use it to set the computer clock.

The only annoyance when using it for time sync is that it doesn't seem to get locked on as fast as the computer boots up, so I have to stop and restart the time sync a couple times after a delay. I'd contemplated building a USB extension cable with a separate 5V power supply so as to keep the receiver powered on all the time. If I had an external powered USB hub that would probably do that also.

I installed it on one of my Raspberry pi yesterday and Yes it was a matter of

plugging it in
installing thegpsd gpsd-clients packages
and editing /etc/defaults/gpsd

Thank you again for showing these to us