so ive been fighting this for about two weeks now and im starting to lose my mind a little. running a TM-D710G with the built in TNC, got it set up for APRS on 144.390, i can see my beacon going out on the radio display and i can hear it hitting the local digi because i see it pop up on aprs.fi maybe once every hour or so but then it just disappears again. my SSID is set to -9 since im mostly mobile, path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard.

the weird part is i can see other stations beaconing fine and they show up consistently on aprs.fi with nice tracks and everything. mine looks like a drunk connect-the-dots where half the dots are just missing. igate coverage in my area should be decent, there are like three of them within 30 miles according to the map.

i did try bumping my beacon rate down to every 2 minutes thinking maybe i was flooding the channel but that didnt seem to make a difference. running about 5 watts to a 5/8 wave mag mount on the roof of the car. is there something dumb i'm obviously doing wrong here or is this just what mobile APRS is like

the path you're using is fine, WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is basically the default everyone uses. 5 watts to a decent mag mount should be workable for mobile. couple things worth checking though — first, what's your SmartBeaconing set to if you're using it? if you're mostly parked or moving slowly the beacon interval can stretch out way longer than you'd expect and it kinda looks like gaps on the map even when the radio is technically working. second thing, and this is the annoying one, aprs.fi only shows the last position it received from an igate, it doesnt show every digi hop. so if a digi is hitting your packet but no igate is picking it up downstream you're basically invisible. the three igates you mentioned, do you know if they're actually RF-to-internet or just internet-only? a lot of what shows up on the igate list is receive-only and if they're not running RF input you're not getting gated. worth cross checking against aprs.is directly or using findu.com raw packets to see what's actually being heard.

yeah what he said about igates vs digis is a real thing people dont think about. also 5 watts can be surprisingly marginal depending on where you're driving, hills and buildings eat it up fast. i run 50w on mine and i still get gaps in spotty areas. might just be RF coverage honestly and not a config problem at all.