so ive been trying to get APRS working for a few weeks now and im pulling my hair out a little. running a TM-D710G in the shack connected to a vertical outside, and i can SEE packets coming in on the display, i can hear the digipeaters doing their thing, but my own position just never shows up on aprs.fi no matter what i do. ive got the path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which seems to be what everyone recommends and my callsign-SSID is set correctly as far as i can tell. beacon interval is every 2 minutes. TX audio is going out, i can see the TX light flash. honestly not sure what to check next, its like the packets are going into the void.

one thing i noticed is that sometimes the radio beacons and i dont hear anything come back from a digi, not even an echo. but other times i do hear a digi respond. so maybe its intermittent? or maybe im just not understanding how the path works. any ideas appreciated, this has been bugging me for like 3 weeks at this point.

few things to check — first, what's your TX deviation set to? the D710G has a separate deviation setting for packet and if it's too high or too low the digi will hear you but the decode will fail. should be around 3-3.5 kHz for 1200 baud APRS. you can verify it with a service monitor or honestly just ask someone nearby to tell you if your packets are decoding clean with something like Direwolf on their end.

also check that your symbol and overlay are set right, sometimes people get the position format wrong, like using compressed vs uncompressed and having a typo in the lat/lon. aprs.fi will sometimes just silently drop a malformed packet. if you have a way to see the raw packet string before it goes out, compare it to what a known-good station looks like. the D710 menu is kinda buried but you can see the raw data in one of the screens.

and yeah WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is correct for most areas, nothing wrong there. the intermittent digi response is suspicious though, might just be terrain or the digi is only hearing you sometimes.

had almost the exact same problem last year. turned out my GPS wasn't actually locked and the radio was sending out a null position or something like 0,0 coordinates which aprs.fi just drops. check that the GPS icon on the D710 is solid and not blinking — blinking usually means it hasnt got a fix yet. if youre in the shack the GPS reception through the roof might be marginal depending on your antenna setup for it.