so ive been messing with APRS for a few weeks now and i finally got my TNC-Pi talking to my 2m rig and packets are definitely going out - i can see myself on aprs.fi which is cool. but the position is like 3 miles from my actual location, which is pretty far off. im using a GP-12 puck GPS antenna sitting on a windowsill inside, wonder if thats the problem or if theres something in the config i screwed up.

the NMEA sentences look right when i monitor the serial port, at least to me they do, lat/lon digits seem to line up with roughly where i live. but then on the map its just... wrong. not like slightly off, but a whole neighborhood over. running Direwolf 1.6 on a Pi 4 if that matters, and the radio is a Kenwood TM-V71A.

anyone run into this before? im probably missing something dumb

pretty common issue actually. first thing id check is whether Direwolf is actually using the GPS coordinates or if you've got a hardcoded position somewhere in the config file. if SYMBOL or LAT/LON are set manually in direwolf.conf those will override whatever the GPS is spitting out. seen a lot of people get tripped up by that especially when they first set it up following some tutorial that had example coords in it.

the windowsill thing might contribute to a weak fix but 3 miles off sounds more like a config issue than poor GPS geometry. cold start in a marginal location might give you a rough first fix but it should settle down after a few minutes. check your conf file first thats my bet.

yeah what he said about the config. also worth checking if maybe aprs.fi is caching an old position from a previous session - sometimes it takes a bit to update if packets are coming in with the same SSID you used before in a different location. try hitting refresh or look at the raw packet data to see what coordinates are actually in the packet itself, that'll tell you real quick if its a GPS problem or a display/caching thing.