so ive been fighting this for about two weeks now and im starting to lose my mind a little. running a Kenwood TM-D710G into a Mobilinkd TNC3 (yeah i know the D710 has its own built in TNC but i wanted to try the bluetooth setup on my phone for a while) and i can see packets being decoded in APRSdroid on my phone, other stations are showing up fine, but my own beacons just never appear on aprs.fi or anywhere else i check. the radio is definitely transmitting, i can see the TX light and ive even heard my own packet burst on a second radio sitting next to me, so RF is going out.

i checked my SSID and callsign like five times, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area, i have three digipeaters within like 15 miles. symbol is set to a car icon. beacon rate is every 2 minutes which honestly might be too frequent but shouldnt cause it to not show up at all right?

the one thing im not 100% sure about is my audio levels from the phone to the TNC, i adjusted them a couple times but idk if they're right. could that cause it to transmit garbage that sounds like a packet but isnt actually decodable? or am i missing something dumb here

yeah the audio level thing is almost certainly your problem. if the deviation is too high or too low the packet goes out but nothing can decode it properly. your second radio picking it up and it sounding like a packet doesnt mean its actually a valid AX.25 frame, it just means the radio keyed up and made noise. what you want to do is find someone locally or use a websdr near you to actually decode your own packets and verify theyre coming through clean.

also worth checking — some phones do weird things with audio processing, like noise cancellation or auto gain control on the mic input, and that absolutely trashes packet audio. theres usually a setting buried in the developer options or you need a specific cable that bypasses the mic preamp. the Mobilinkd should have some level indicator in its companion app if i remember right, try to hit somewhere around 60-70% and see if that helps. once i got my levels dialed in my igate started seeing my own beacons almost immediately.

might also want to double check your path isnt getting gated but just not showing with your callsign for some reason — occasionally ive seen aprs.fi be weird about new stations, try searching just your base call without the SSID. also make sure you dont have a typo in the callsign somewhere, APRSdroid can be finnicky about that and wont always warn you.