so ive been trying to get my APRS setup working for about three weeks now and im at my wits end. running a TM-D710G with the built in TNC, path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. i can see my beacon going out on the radio display and i can hear other stations being decoded fine but when i check aprs.fi i dont see myself showing up at all, or sometimes i show up once and then disappear for like 45 minutes even though my beacon interval is set to 2 minutes.

theres a digi about 8 miles from me that i can hear just fine — i can see it digipeating other stations on the display. so its not like i'm totally off in the weeds here. i checked my callsign and SSID like four times. the only thing i havent really dug into is whether my deviation is off or something. also running a mag mount on the car, which yeah i know isnt ideal but it worked fine for voice.

anybody run into something like this or have a checklist i should work through? feels like its something dumb i'm overlooking.

the deviation thing is actually worth checking first, APRS is really picky about that. on the D710 you want to make sure you're not over or under deviating — ideally around 3.5 kHz for 1200 baud. if your voice setup is peaking at 5 kHz the TNC might be sending out audio thats too hot and the digi just wont decode it even though you can hear it fine subjectively. theres a built in test tone on the D710 somewhere in the TNC menu, i'd use that and a meter or just ask someone local with a properly calibrated radio to give you a signal report on the packet audio.

also the path WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is correct but check that you havent accidentally got a space or weird character in there — ive seen the D710 do some funky things when you edit paths through certain menu versions. and the 45 minute dropout thing makes me think youre getting digipeated once and then something upstream is filtering you. some igates run duplicate suppression windows. not saying thats definitely it but worth knowing.

had basically the same issue last year. turned out my SSID was conflicting with another mobile station in the area running the same callsign-9. aprs.fi was showing the other guy and my packets were getting dropped as dupes by the igate. changed to -7 and suddenly i started showing up consistently. probably not your exact problem but worth at least pulling up aprs.fi and checking if there's another station with your callsign anywhere nearby doing something weird.