so ive been trying to get my APRS setup working for about two weeks now and im at my wits end. running a TM-D710G with the internal TNC, antenna is a diamond NR770H on the roof which works fine for regular 2m. i can hear packets coming in on 144.390, the radio is decoding them and i can see them scrolling on the display. but when i beacon, nothing shows up on aprs.fi — not even after 20 minutes of waiting.

i set the beacon interval to 1 minute just to test so its not like im waiting for a 30 min interval to fire. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. SSID is -9 since im in the car. tx audio level i havent touched since i got the radio, which maybe is the problem? i honestly dont know where to start looking. the only thing i can think of is maybe the path isnt being picked up by a digi nearby but i can hear plenty of packets so there must be coverage around here

tx audio is almost certainly your issue, or at least the first thing to check. the D710 internal TNC is pretty picky about deviation. if youre overdeviating the packets sound like garbage to the digi and just get dropped. grab a copy of direwolf or even just tune to 144.390 on an SDR and look at the waveform — you want clean AFSK not clipping.

also double check your MYCALL is actually set right in the TNC config and not just in the radio memory. ive seen people spend days on this and it was just the callsign had a typo in one place. and yeah WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine, thats what most people run.

might also be worth pulling up aprsdroid on your phone with an SDR dongle just to see if your own packets are actually being heard by anything locally before blaming the path. aprs.fi only updates when an igate actually receives your packet from a digi, so if theres a gap in coverage you could be hitting a digi but the nearest igate is offline or something. happens more than people think, some of these igates are running on old raspberry pis at guys houses and they go down all the time lol