so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and finally got a TNC-Pi running on a Pi 4 with Direwolf and everything seems fine on the RF side — my Baofeng hits the local digi no problem, i can see my packets getting repeated on the RF channel when i monitor with a second radio. but they never show up on aprs.fi or findu or anywhere online. the digipeater is definitely active because other stations are showing up fine on the map.

im using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path which should be right for my area, and my SSID is set to -9 since im mostly mobile. Direwolf is configured as a TNC passthrough basically, not running its own igate. is that the problem? do i need a separate igate in the area picking me up directly? i thought the digi would handle forwarding to the internet but maybe i have that wrong. the digi owner hasnt responded to my emails so im kind of just guessing at this point.

yeah you've got it a little backwards — the digipeater just repeats the packet on RF, it doesn't push anything to the internet. you need an igate for that, which is a separate station that's connected to the APRS-IS network and also listening on 144.390. when your packet gets digi'd, an igate somewhere nearby has to hear it and then upload it to the servers. so if there's no igate covering your area you could have perfect RF and still be invisible online.

check aprs.fi and look at the raw packets tab for your callsign, sometimes it shows up but delayed. also look at who's igateing in your area using the map — filter for igates specifically. if there's a gap in coverage you might want to think about running your own igate, which with direwolf is actually pretty easy to set up, you just need a decent internet connection and to configure the APRSIS32 or direwolf IGSERVER settings properly.

also worth double checking your baud rate is actually 1200 and not something weird — ive seen direwolf default configs cause issues with some setups. and the baofeng thing, just make sure your TX delay is set high enough, those radios have a slower PTT response than dedicated APRS radios and if the TNC starts sending before the radio is fully keyed up you lose the beginning of the packet and digis wont decode it cleanly.