so ive been running APRS for about 8 months now and i think i finally have a decent setup but something has been nagging at me for a while. im using a Kenwood TM-D710G with the built in TNC and i have it set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i know is pretty standard but im in a fairly rural area about 30 miles from the nearest city and i keep seeing my packets show up on aprs.fi with like 3 or 4 hops sometimes and other times barely anything gets through at all.

my question is mostly about the path — should i be using something different out here or is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 still the right call. ive read some stuff that says WIDE2-2 is better for rural areas because you get more hops but then other stuff says that just creates congestion. i honestly cant tell if my packets are even hitting a fill-in digi or if theyre going straight to a wide digi. is there a way to figure that out just from what aprs.fi shows you

also secondary question — the messaging function on the 710 is kind of clunky but does anyone actually use it for real communication or is it mostly just a novelty at this point

the path thing is one of those debates that never really fully settles but here's what i'd say — in a rural area WIDE2-2 can actually make sense because you need those extra hops to reach a digi at all. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is designed for areas where there are fill-in digis that respond to WIDE1-1 first, if those arent around then that first hop is kind of wasted. you can check aprs.fi and click on your callsign then look at the raw packets, it'll show you which digis actually touched the packet and in what order. that gives you a pretty good picture of whats happening. the path shows up in the path field for each individual packet so you can see exactly who digipeated it.

for the messaging, i actually use it semi regularly on nets and occasionally for emcomm stuff. its not fast and yeah the interface on the 710 is annoying to type on but it gets the job done. some of the newer software clients like Xastir or even APRS-IS stuff make messaging way more usable if you have a computer tied in.

yeah aprs.fi will show you the digipeater path in the packet detail, look for the path trace on each entry. if you see WIDE1-1 in the via field getting replaced with an actual callsign you know a fill-in digi grabbed it. if you're only seeing wide area digis then you probably dont have any WIDE1-1 capable fill-ins nearby and you might as well just run WIDE2-2 and skip that first hop entirely.

i went through the same thing when i moved out to a more rural area. ended up dropping to WIDE2-2 and my coverage actually got more consistent. less elegant maybe but it worked. also depending on how remote you are you might want to bump your beacon rate down a little so you're not hammering the channel unnecessarily since out in the sticks there's probably not a ton of traffic anyway.