so ive been messing with APRS for about three weeks now and i cannot get my position to show up on aprs.fi consistently. sometimes it appears, sometimes it just vanishes for hours. im running a Kenwood TM-D710G with the built in TNC and ive got the SSID set to -9 since im mostly mobile. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard for mobile ops.

the radio shows it's transmitting — i can see the TX light flash every 2 minutes like its supposed to — and occasionally ill even hear my own packet come back through a local digi. but aprs.fi just doesnt seem to care half the time. checked my callsign a dozen times, its definitely right. is this a path issue or could it be something with the IGate coverage in my area? i looked up the local digipeaters on the RF coverage map and there seem to be a few around but i dunno if theyre all connected to the internet backbone or whatever.

also is there any way to tell if a digi is actually igate-connected short of just watching aprs.fi and hoping?

the WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path is fine for mobile, thats what most people run. your problem is almost certainly igates. a digipeater will happily re-transmit your packet all day long but if there isnt an igate within earshot that has an internet connection, none of it makes it to aprs-is and you wont see squat on aprs.fi.

easiest way to check is pull up aprs.fi and look at the map for your area, there should be igate stations marked differently from digis. if the nearest one is 50 miles away you've found your problem. you can also try dropping your beacon rate down and just listening for a while — if you hear lots of packet traffic but your position still drops off, its likely the igate situation and not your radio config. the D710G's TNC is solid, i'd be surprised if thats the culprit.

yeah i had basically the exact same issue when i first set mine up. what helped me was installing Direwolf on a pi and running my own igate — obivously thats kind of a nuclear option just to diagnose the problem but once i had it running i could actually see in the logs whether my own packets were being heard. turns out there was a digi near me that was NOT internet connected, it was just floating out there on RF only, which is apparently still a thing some people run for local mesh-type stuff i guess.

also worth checking if maybe your audio drive level is off. even with a built in TNC like the D710 ive seen people have decode issues when the internal settings got bumped somehow. if your packets are malformed the digis might be rejecting them silently.