so ive been trying to get my APRS setup working for about two weeks now and im losing my mind a little. running a TM-D710G with the internal TNC, callsign and SSID are set correctly (pretty sure anyway), path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 and i can hear packets on 144.390 just fine. the radio decodes them and i can see the station list filling up. but when i key up and send a beacon, nothing shows on aprs.fi. tried manual beacon, smart beaconing, doesnt matter.

one thing i noticed is the TX light does flash when i beacon so it IS transmitting something. a buddy a few miles away with a direwolf IGate said he can occasionally hear my packets but they're not making it to the internet. he said something about the SSID on my path being wrong but i dont fully understand what he meant. is there like a setting on the radio that controls what gets included in the packet header vs just the voice side of things?

also is there any way to decode my own packets locally to verify the packet content before it goes out? i have a spare SDR dongle sitting around.

the SDR idea is actually pretty solid for self-monitoring. pipe the audio into direwolf on your laptop and set it to just decode, youll see the raw packet string and can verify your callsign, path, symbol, everything. that's the fastest way to catch a formatting issue without depending on someone else to hear you.

on the path thing — WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine for most areas, your buddy might have been talking about something else. one thing to double check on the D710 is whether the TNC is actually in APRS mode vs just packet mode. there's a difference and its easy to have it in the wrong one. also check that your beacon comment or position format isnt somehow corrupted. ive seen radios where a firmware quirk sends a malformed lat/lon that digipeaters just silently drop.

had almost the exact same problem last year. turned out my APRS symbol was set to something the software didn't like and iGates in my area were just not forwarding it for some reason — never fully figured that part out honestly. but the bigger issue for me was that i was too far from an iGate and the two digipeaters between me and the nearest one were both kind of flaky. you can check coverage on aprs.fi by looking at who's actually hitting your area, zoom in and see if theres even an active iGate within a hop or two of you.

also try sending a message to SMSGTE or something just to see if messaging works independent of position beacons, sometimes that helps narrow down whats broken.