so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and finally got my TM-D710G set up as a full digi/igate combo at my QTH. the radio is doing what i think is the right thing, i can see my own packets on the display and aprs.fi shows my station occasionally but its really inconsistent. like sometimes ill show up every 10 minutes like expected, other times i disappear for 45 min or more.

the path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard for a fixed station but maybe thats wrong? im in a somewhat rural area, nearest igate i know of is maybe 30 miles out. my antenna is a comet GP-3 at about 25 feet, feeding into the TNC built into the radio. the simplex frequency is 144.390 obviously.

what i cant figure out is whether this is an RF problem, a path problem, or something with direwolf on the igate side — i set up direwolf on a pi last week and pointed it at NOAM. the digi side seems to be working because i can see other stations getting relayed through me. its just my own beacon thats acting weird.

fixed stations really shouldnt be using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 — thats more of a mobile path. for a fixed station at decent height you can usually just do WIDE2-1 or even WIDE2-2 depending on the network density around you. WIDE1-1 is meant to hit fill-in digis that are low to the ground, and if you're already elevated it kinda wastes a hop. try dropping it to just WIDE2-1 and see if your packets are getting through more cleanly.

also 30 miles to the nearest igate is pretty rough depending on terrain. if your packets are getting digi'd but not reaching the igate theres not a lot you can do about that from the path side. have you looked at whether your direwolf igate is actually connecting to the APRS-IS server? sometimes the pi just quietly drops the connection and doesnt reconnect cleanly. i check mine every week honestly because it happens more than you'd think.

yeah what he said on the path thing, i had the same issue when i first set mine up. but also check your beacon rate — the TM-D710 has that SmartBeaconing thing and if its configured for mobile operation it might be suppressing beacons when it thinks youre stationary. theres a setting in the menu somewhere that controls the stationary timeout, i forget which menu number it is but its in there. i spent like two weeks thinking my igate was broken when it was just the radio deciding i didnt need to beacon because i hadnt moved lol.