Tloz123:
can I completely rule out the fact that the GPS is not faulty in terms of hardware since the arduino ide is printing out outputs..
No, as it looks like the GPS is getting no signals.
Before it gets an actual fix, it would normally display the current time which it gets (from cold) from a GPS satellite.
$GPGGA,000209.000
Indicates that either the current time is 00:02:09 or the GPS has been running for 2mins 9secs and not seen any signals.
Changing the GPS configuration to display the GPGSV sentence might provide more clues.
In any case the PPS light on the GPS should chnage in some way between no fix and fix, you dont need software to check that, just power to the GPS.