so ive been fighting this for about a week now and im starting to wonder if im just missing something obvious. running a TM-D710G in the shack connected to a mag mount on the roof, position is set manually in the radio since i dont have a GPS hooked up to it yet. the beacon is definitely going out — i can see it hitting aprs.fi and showing up in the heard list from a couple of the local digipeaters — but the position its showing is like 40 miles northwest of me out in the middle of nowhere.

i went back and double checked the lat/lon i entered in the radio and it looks right to me, at least the degrees part. wondering if maybe i fat-fingered the minutes or the N/W hemisphere designator somewhere. gonna check again tonight but wanted to see if anyone else has run into this and what the usual culprit is. the symbol is showing up correct at least (house icon) so its not a total disaster

yeah the minutes thing gets people all the time. APRS uses DDmm.mmN format which is degrees then decimal minutes, not degrees minutes seconds. so if you're used to entering coordinates as like 45 30 00 N you'd put that in as 4530.00N not 45.3000N or whatever. if those get swapped around you end up miles away from where you actually are. also double check that you have the correct hemisphere — W for west longitude is obvious but i've seen people accidentally put E and end up in Europe or somewhere. the D710 menu for position entry is a little clunky imo, easy to tab past something without realizing it.

honestly just get a cheap USB GPS puck and let the radio sort it out, saves a lot of headache. i think i paid like 12 bucks for mine on amazon and plugged it into the data port and never looked back. the manual position entry on those radios works fine but one wrong digit and youre beaconing from a cornfield somewhere lol