so ive been fighting with this for a couple weeks now and im kind of at my wit's end. running a TM-D710G with the internal TNC, path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 and i can see my beacon transmitting on the radio (the little TX light blinks, audio comes out the speaker briefly) but nothing ever shows up on aprs.fi for my callsign. i know theres at least two digipeaters within 30 miles of me because i can see their beacons on the waterfall when i monitor 144.390.

ive tried adjusting the beacon rate, tried changing the symbol, tried connecting to a local IGate directly using APRS-IS through aprsdroid on my phone just to confirm my callsign formatting is right. that all works fine. so the RF side is clearly the issue. tx power is set to 5w, antenna is a 5/8 wave mag mount on the roof of my car, swr checked out okay when i tested it a couple months ago.

one thing i noticed is that when i put the radio in monitor mode i hear a lot of traffic but my own packets dont seem to be getting digi'd. could this be a timing issue with the TNC? or maybe the path is just not getting picked up? not sure where to go from here honestly.

first thing id check is your TXDELAY setting on the TNC. the D710 internal TNC defaults to something like 250ms i think and thats usually fine but ive seen situations where its actually too short or sometimes too long and the digipeater just doesnt decode it cleanly. also worth double checking that youre actually transmitting on 144.390 and not some slightly off frequency — the internal reference can drift a little on older units.

the other thing, and this catches people more than youd think, is the SSID. if youre running like KD9XYZ-9 or whatever but the path or something is malformed aprs.fi might just be dropping it silently. pull up a direwolf decode on a laptop with a cheap SDR and actually listen to your own packets, see what youre putting out. that'll tell you real fast if the issue is encoding or path or something else entirely.

yeah that monitor mode trick is actually useful, if you're hearing lots of traffic but nobody's digi'ing you it could just be collisions. busy channel plus your beacon rate being too agressive and youre gonna step on other packets constantly. i dropped mine down to like every 10 minutes when im just parked and it helped a lot. also some of the older WIDE1-1 digis in certain areas are kinda flaky and just dont respond well to certain TNC timing. not much you can do about that except try a different path maybe just WIDE2-2 and see if a different digi picks you up.