so ive been messing with APRS for a few weeks now and i cant figure out why my packets are getting digipeated locally (i can see them on RF) but they never seem to make it to aprs.fi. my setup is a Kenwood TM-D710G hooked into APRSIS32 on a windows box, and i set the path to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. the nearest igate i know of is about 12 miles away and shows as active on the map so its not like there's nothing out there to hear me.

i ran a test for like an hour yesterday and nothing showed up on aprs.fi under my callsign. did a search, nothing. the TNC in the radio is definitely decoding packets fine because i can see other stations scrolling by in the software. its just MY packets that seem to vanish into the ether after the first hop. i even boosted output to 50w thinking maybe the igate just wasnt hearing me but still nothing.

is there a way to see if the digipeater is actually passing my packets along or just killing them? maybe the digi is broken or misconfigured on that end? i feel like im just going in circles here

check if the igate is internet connected first — a lot of igates in rural areas are technically running but the guy's internet went down and nobody noticed for six months. aprs.fi shows them as active for a while after they go offline, it doesnt update instantly. you can also try aprsdirect.com which sometimes has fresher data.

also your path looks fine but one thing worth checking is whether you have your SSID set correctly and that you havent accidentally put a space in the callsign field or something dumb like that. ive seen people chase their tail for days over a trailing space in the config. the digipeater will repeat the packet but if the callsign is malformed aprs.fi might not index it right.

if you want to verify the digi is actually passing your packets, see if anyone else can hear you on RF downwind of the digi. or honestly just post your callsign here and ill check if anything is showing up that you might be missing on your end.

yeah this happened to me too when i first got into APRS. turned out the igate near me was an old setup running UI-View that the owner just never updated and it had some filter that was only passing certain SSIDs or something weird. i never fully understood it but once i found a different igate path to hit my stuff showed up fine.

one thing you can do is grab a cheap RTL-SDR and run it as a second receiver just to confirm your transmissions actually sound like proper APRS audio — sometimes the deviation is off on the radio and it sounds fine to you but the igate cant decode it. the D710 shouldnt have that problem out of the box but worth ruling out