so ive been running APRS for a few months now, mostly just vehicle tracking with a Mobilinkd TNC hooked to my FT-65 and an old android phone running APRSdroid. works okay but i keep reading about path settings and honestly im more confused now than before i started reading about it.

right now im just running WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which is what someone at the club told me to set and it seems to get me into the network but i see some guys running just WIDE2-1 and others running WIDE1-1 only and i dont really understand when you'd use one vs the other. is WIDE1-1 just for hitting fill-in digis or what? and does it actually matter that much if youre in a decent coverage area?

also side question -- is there a good way to see if your packets are actually getting digipeated correctly or am i just supposed to trust aprs.fi and hope for the best

yeah WIDE1-1 is specifically meant to hit low-power fill-in digipeaters, the kind that dont have the full WIDE infrastructure but still retransmit to help mobile stations. if youre in an area with good coverage from full-height digis you probably dont even need it and youre just adding an extra hop that wastes channel time. WIDE2-1 alone gets you into the main network fine in most places.

the general rule of thumb ive heard is if youre mobile use WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 because youre low to the ground and might need the help. if youre a home station or somewhere with good digi coverage drop it to just WIDE2-1. running WIDE2-2 is kind of frowned on unless youre out in the boonies, it floods the channel.

for checking if it's working aprs.fi has a station detail view that shows which digipeaters heard you and what path was actually used. thats way more useful than just seeing your icon on the map. also aprsdirect.com sometimes shows more raw packet data if you wanna dig into it.

the Mobilinkd with APRSdroid combo is actually pretty solid, i ran that same setup for a while before i got a dedicated tracker. one thing to double check is your audio levels going into the TNC, if the input is clipping your packets will decode like garbage at the other end even though they look fine on your screen. aprs.fi showing your position doesn't mean the packet was clean, just that it was decodable enough.

also unrelated but if you ever want to step up from APRSdroid, Xastir on a laptop or even a raspberry pi running direwolf as a software TNC is a whole other level for seeing whats happening on the channel. you can see every packet, decode rates, all that stuff. kind of overkill for just tracking but its fun to poke around with