I don’t know where exactly your problem is, so I try to give a somewhat general explanation:

GPSD is in effect nothing more than a telnet interface to the data your GPS device delivers. Thus, in normal mode it will just sit idle on your system, doing nothing – not even accessing the GPS device.

Only when an application connects to GPSD and asks for some data a connection to the GPS device will be made. You can verify this by opening a command prompt and give the command “telnet localhost 2947″ (without the quotes). You should see some prompts which you can safely ignore. Now just type the letter “p” and hit return. You will get an answer that starts with the string “GPSD” followed either by some longitude and lattitude information or a simple question mark if no location data could be obtained. The more important thing is that NOW GPSD should have opened a connection to your GPS device. So if you haven’t paired your Mac and the GPS device yet, you’ll be prompted to do so. If they’re already paired, subsequent commands like “p” or “d” will return some data.

So the important part is: As long as there are no clients connected to GPSD, it will not try to open a connection to the GPS device.

Hope that clarified things for you. If not, just report back.

Thanks!