When I leave my quadcopter sitting in the home position for any length of time, (5 minutes) I notice via mission planner that the gps position wander around at about 2 metres and thats with 13 sats, hdop 0.8, Is that normal to expect?
That’s not bad actually. As expected.
Do you think I would expect better results using a pixhawk 2.1, which is out of my league price wise.
The Flight Controller won’t make a difference in this regard. What you are describing is typical for the Sats and Hdop you are reporting. A better quality GPS module could improve things a bit but ~2m is expected performance for standard M8N GPS.
And if you’re close to buildings, or close to the ground (as you normally are before flying 
) some multipathing an interference can cause this. It usually gets better once launched and a few meters above ground.
Buy a Septentrio RTK GPS with a dedicated Antenna and Basestation, fly in an environment without sky obstructions … and voila you will get 1~3 cm drift.
We do that, but we paid top dollar to get it. Do you really need it? What is your application?
Thanks all for your replies.
I am happy with 2 meter drift just wasn’t sure what to expect. I thought that the gps module may be faulty.
What I am looking for is reliability as I want to send the quadcopter out to sea about 600 to 800 mtrs, drop a line and RTL. Of course I don’t want to lose it.
I am using a pixhawk px4 from ‘Ready To Sky’ which is so far very reliable.
I don’t think having a more expensive FC would be any more reliable, maybe I am wrong?
Any advise would be helpful.