so ive been trying to get my APRS setup working properly and im losing my mind a little. running a TM-D710G connected to a raspberry pi with direwolf, feeding into APRS-IS through an ethernet connection. the radio is beaconing fine, i can hear my own packets come back out of the speaker and direwolf is decoding them, but when i check aprs.fi i sometimes see my position and sometimes i dont. its totally random. sometimes it shows up within 30 seconds, sometimes not for like 10 minutes, sometimes not at all.

i checked the path and im using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be getting picked up by the local digis. there are at least 3 digipeaters within range according to the map. RF environment seems decent, im running 50 watts into a vertical on the roof. the thing that really confuses me is that direwolf shows good decode quality on its own packets when it hears them come back, so the RF side seems okay.

anyone dealt with this kind of intermittent thing before? starting to wonder if its a timing issue with my beacon interval or maybe the IGate closest to me is having issues. set to beacon every 2 minutes right now.

2 minute interval is actually pretty aggressive depending on where you are, some areas the channel gets congested and packets collide constantly. the APRS spec kind of assumes smart beaconing where you slow down when stationary. if your beacon interval is fixed at 2 mins and youre not moving, youre probably stepping on other traffic and causing collisions, which would explain the random appearance on aprs.fi.

also check if your IGate is actually connected. pull up the APRS-IS server logs or just watch the raw feed for your callsign. sometimes the IGate near you is gated RF-to-internet fine but the server connection drops and nobody notices for hours. direwolf has a log you can watch in real time that shows whether packets are actually making it to APRS-IS. id start there before assuming its an RF problem.

had almost the exact same thing happen to me last spring. turned out one of the digipeaters i thought was active had been off the air for months and nobody updated the map. so my packets were getting out but only reaching one digi instead of two hops like i expected. dropped back to just WIDE2-2 instead of WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 and it actually got more consistent because i wasnt relying on a digi that wasnt there.

also worth double checking your SSID isnt conflicting with something else on the channel near you, probably not the issue but ive seen weird stuff happen.