so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and i finally got my Kenwood TM-D710G set up with a proper antenna on the roof, been watching aprs.fi and my packets are getting out but something looks off. like my position keeps jumping around even when im parked and not moving, and sometimes the path shows a ridiculous number of hops before it hits the internet gateway.

im using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 as my path which i thought was the standard thing to do, but i see guys at the club running just WIDE2-2 and they seem to get out fine. is there actually a difference in how those get handled by digis? i know WIDE1-1 is supposed to hit fill-in digis first but im not sure if thats actually helping me or just cluttering up the channel. our area has decent coverage already.

also the position jumping thing is probably a GPS issue right? the GPS lock seems solid on the radio display but aprs.fi shows me like three blocks away sometimes. just wondering if anyone else ran into this

the path thing — yeah theres a real difference. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 will hit fill-in digis (home stations that have WIDE1-1 enabled) before going to the full network digis. if youre already in a well-covered area that can actually cause more channel noise than anything because youre getting digipeated extra times when you dont need to be. WIDE2-2 in good coverage areas is usually cleaner, two hops max and you dont spam the local fill-ins.

the position jumping is almost definitely not your GPS, its more likely packet collisions. APRS is uncoordinated so if two stations transmit at the same time the packets corrupt each other and sometimes a partial decode ends up with a garbled position. aprs.fi kinda interpolates sometimes too. try dropping your beacon rate a little if you havent already, especially if youre parked. no point hammering the channel every 30 seconds when nothing is changing.

yeah what he said about the path. i went through the same thing when i set mine up, was using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 because thats what some old guide online said and one of the guys at a hamfest looked at my config and was like dude you dont need that in this area. switched to WIDE2-1 and honestly my packets show up more consistently not less. kinda counterintuitive but the channel congestion thing is real especially if your local digi is busy.

one other thing — make sure your transmit audio level going into the radio from the GPS/TNC side is actually calibrated right. i had my D710 doing weird stuff for weeks and it turned out the deviation was way off and half my packets were getting decoded wrong downstream. theres a way to check it but i forget exactly where in the menu it is off the top of my head, maybe page through the advanced settings.