so ive been messing with APRS for about three weeks now and i cannot for the life of me get my beacon to show up on aprs.fi consistently. sometimes it appears, sometimes it just doesnt. im running a TM-D710G through a Mobilinkd TNC3 connected to my phone with APRSdroid, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. the thing is i can hear other stations just fine on 144.390, i see packets decoding in the app, so the receive side seems okay. its just my own transmissions that are flaky.

i drove around for like 45 minutes yesterday and the track on aprs.fi was just... partial. maybe 30% of my positions actually showed up. digipeaters in the area seem active because i can see them relaying other traffic. my RF power is set to high on the radio so that shouldnt be an issue. anybody run into this before or have ideas what to check? starting to wonder if its something with how APRSdroid is configured or maybe the TNC connection is dropping packets before they even get transmitted

the partial track thing is usually either a path problem or your transmit timing is colliding with other stations. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine but if youre in a dense area with lots of APRS traffic your packets are probably stepping on each other. also worth checking — is your SmartBeaconing set up in APRSdroid or are you using a fixed interval? fixed interval beaconing is kind of the worst thing you can do in a busy area because everybody ends up transmitting at the same time roughly. SmartBeaconing will vary your rate based on speed and heading change which reduces collisions a lot.

also double check your SSID. if youre mobile you should be using -9. not sure it affects whether the packet shows up but aprs.fi does some filtering based on SSID type and it can affect how your track renders.

had basically the exact same issue with a Mobilinkd a while back and it turned out the bluetooth connection was dropping intermittently and APRSdroid doesnt always make it obvious when that happens. it'll look like its connected but packets just disappear into nowhere. try watching the TX indicator on the TNC itself when you expect a beacon to go out and see if its actually keying the radio. thats how i figured mine out — the light just wasnt blinking when it should have been.