so ive been messing with APRS for a few weeks now and i finally got my Mobilinkd TNC paired with my baofeng on 144.390 and packets are actually hitting aprs.fi which is great. but the position it shows is like 40 miles from where i actually am. im feeding it GPS coordinates from my phone via the bluetooth connection and the app shows the right coords, so im not sure where the breakdown is happening.

running APRSdroid on android, the GPS lock looks solid, i can see it pulling lat/lon that matches where i am. but on the map online my icon keeps showing up somewhere way out in the boonies. tried deleting my callsign from the site and re-beaconing but same thing every time. anyone run into this before or have an idea what im doing wrong

check how APRSdroid is formatting the coordinates before they go out. there was a bug in older versions where it would send the position in decimal degrees but the packet encoder was expecting degrees and decimal minutes which is the NMEA standard format. so like if your lat is 41.5432 it might be sending that literally instead of converting it to 4132.59N or whatever the proper format is. the igates will still pass the packet but aprs.fi will decode the position wrong and put you in the middle of nowhere.

update the app if you havent already and also look at the raw packets on aprs.fi, theres a link on your station page to see the raw data. if the position string looks weird like its missing the degree symbol format or the N/W designator is off that'll tell you right there. also double check your symbol and SSID settings while youre in there, sometimes a misconfigured SSID on a mobile station causes weird display behavior too though thats probably not your issue here.

yeah what he said about the raw packets is the first thing to look at. i had something similar happen when i first set mine up and it turned out i had the longitude sign wrong, was sending E instead of W and ended up somewhere in europe lol. easy fix once you see the raw data.