so ive been messing with APRS for a few weeks now and something weird is going on. my packets are definitely getting out because i can see myself on aprs.fi through the igate a few miles away, but the local digipeater about 8 miles away doesnt seem to be hearing me at all or at least not digipeating my packets. i'm running a TM-D710 into a mag mount on the car, path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. tx power is at 5w.

the weird thing is when i drive closer to town i start seeing my packets getting digi'd fine, so i dont think its a config issue necessarily, just maybe terrain or something. my home QTH is in kind of a low spot. anyway the reason i care is i want to be able to hit the digi from the house too with a fixed station but right now its clearly not working and i cant figure out if its my antenna, the path, or just physics being physics.

anyone dealt with something like this before? is there a way to actually tell if a digi heard you vs just an igate picking you up direct?

yeah the aprs.fi path display will actually tell you this if you click on a specific packet — it shows the path it took, so if it says something like WIDE1-1* with an asterisk that means the first hop got digipeated, if there's no asterisk anywhere it probably went direct to the igate. worth checking that first before assuming the digi is the problem.

also 5w into a mag mount at a low QTH is gonna be rough for anything more than a couple miles to a digi depending on what's in between. I run 25w from the house into a slim jim up about 25 feet and even then one of the local digis is hit or miss depending on the season weirdly, probably foliage or something. you might just be dealing with the terrain issue you suspected.

the path thing is worth double checking too. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine for mobile but from a fixed home station a lot of people drop it to just WIDE2-1 or even WIDE2-2 depending on how dense the network is around you. doesnt really solve your immediate problem but its worth knowing. and yeah what the other guy said about reading the path on aprs.fi is the right call, that'll at least tell you whats actually happening to your packets after they leave your radio.