so ive been messing with APRS for about 6 months now and mostly its been fine, i can see my position on aprs.fi and stuff gets relayed around locally no problem. but theres this weird thing happening where my packets get picked up by the local digi maybe 8 miles away and then just... stop. like they never make it to the next one which should be on the hilltop to the east. i can see other stations getting through that path just fine so i dont think its the digi itself.

im running a TM-D710A with a mag mount on the truck, 50 watts into what is honestly probably not the greatest antenna but it shouldnt matter at 50w right? using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 for my path. ive tried bumping the TX delay up thinking maybe the digi was timing out on my packet but that didnt change anything. im kind of stumped and dont really know what else to check at this point

first thing id check is whether your symbol and path are actually being decoded correctly at the first digi. sometimes what looks like a relay is actually just aprs-is injecting your packet back in from an igate somewhere and it only looks like it went through the digi. pull up the raw packets on aprs.fi and look at the path trace, youll see if WIDE1-1 actually got decremented to WIDE1* which would show it was actually digipeated vs just seen directly by an igate.

also 50 watts with a mag mount honestly might not be as good as you think depending on your ground plane situation. mag mounts on a truck cab can be pretty decent but if the antenna isnt centered or the cab geometry is weird youll lose a few db you didnt expect to lose. not saying thats it but worth ruling out. whats your packet rate set to, are you beaconing smart or fixed interval

yeah the raw packet thing is the move, been burned by that exact situation before where i thought my path was working and it was just igate magic making it look right on the map. also check if that hilltop digi is actually running WIDE2-2 or if someobdy set it up wrong and its only doing WIDE1-1. ive seen community digis misconfigured and nobody notices for months because most people are close enough that one hop covers them anyway