Yeah, that 1830 is the number of characters since the start of the stream, like you say. (I think it's specifically 1 plus the number of bytes, as documented at [1].)
Racket errors tend to report whatever location information they can, and Racket ports track four things: The name of the file, the line number, the column number, and the overall position in the stream. But line-counting isn't enabled by default on Racket streams, so the error you see doesn't contain the line number information.
I just pushed a commit[2] to Anarki that enables line-counting on the stream when an Arc files is loaded, which should mean you can now see the line and column of a reader error. A reader error on line 17, column 6 should now be printed like so: