so ive been running APRS for a few months now with a TM-D710G and at first it seemed fine but lately im getting almost nothing on aprs.fi when i check my station. i can hear packets coming in all day long, the radio is decoding them, but my own beacons just seem to disappear into the void. i'm in a semi-rural area, not like deep mountains or anything, probably 15-20 miles from the nearest igate i think.

my path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was the standard thing to do. beacon rate is every 2 minutes which seems reasonable. the TNC built into the 710 is doing all the encoding. i dont have a separate TNC or anything. i did mess around with the beacon text a couple weeks ago adding my grid square but i cant imagine that broke anything.

anyone run into this before? is there something obvious im missing or should i just accept that coverage is spotty out here

WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is correct for your situation, dont change that. the thing i'd check first is your transmit audio level going into the TNC — on the 710 specifically this can drift or get set wrong if you've been through any menu resets. basically if the deviation is too high or too low the digipeaters will hear garbage and just drop the packet. there's a way to check it with a service monitor but most people just try nudging the internal pot and see if things improve, which honestly isnt ideal but it works.

also worth checking aprs.fi and filtering to RF only — sometimes packets do make it to an igate but aprs.fi is showing you a weird cached view. and 2 minutes is actually pretty frequent, some digis in lightly loaded areas are fine with that but just double check you're not set to smart beaconing AND fixed interval at the same time, the 710 can do weird stuff if both are kind of enabled.

yeah i had almost the exact same issue last year. turned out one of the igates i thought was nearby was actually dead and hadnt been updated on aprs.fi in like 8 months, it just still showed up on the map. checked the last-heard timestamp and it was ancient. so i was basically digipeating into nothing for weeks.

aprsdirect.com sometimes gives you a better picture of whats actually active near you vs aprs.fi. anyway once i found a real live igate and aimed a yagi roughly that direction for testing it started working. obviously not a permanent solution but it confirmed the path was fine and the igate was the problem.