so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and I thought I had a decent understanding of how paths work but apparently not. Running a Kenwood TM-D710G with the internal TNC, set to transmit every 2 minutes on 144.390, path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which is what everyone seems to recommend for mobile but my beacon just isnt showing up consistently on aprs.fi. Sometimes I see it, sometimes nothing for like 45 minutes even when im driving through an area that definitely has digis.

The weird thing is I can see other stations hitting those same digis just fine so its not a coverage issue. I checked my callsign and SSID setup probably a dozen times. Running -9 for mobile which should be right. Symbol is set to car. Honestly not sure if its a TNC config thing or if im just not understanding how the path actually propagates through the network.

Anyone dealt with this? Is there something in the TM-D710 setup specifically that bites people? I did update the firmware a while back but I dont remember if that changed anything with the TNC behavior.

the D710 has a quirk where if your baud rate on the TNC side doesnt match what you've got configured in the radio menu it'll just silently fail to key up properly. Worth double checking that everything is set to 1200 baud consistently. Also make sure your TX delay isnt set too low — I had mine at like 20ms and kept having the same problem, bumped it to 50ms and it sorted itself out almost immediately.

The other thing I'd check is your audio levels going into the TNC from the radio's discriminator. If you're clipping or too low the packets will encode garbage and digis won't even bother repeating them. Direwolf has a nice tool for checking this if you can pipe audio into a laptop, just to verify what's actually coming out before you spend more time chasing gremlins in the path config.

yeah what he said about TX delay is real. also just to mention — WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine but if you're in a dense area with a lot of APRS traffic you might actually be getting digipeated and then gated but the IGate that covers that area could be down or firewalled or something. aprs.fi only shows what gets into the APRS-IS network so if the IGate has issues you wont see it even if your packets are going out perfectly. Try checking if you can decode your own packets on a second receiver, even just a baofeng scanning 144.390, just to confirm the radio is actually putting out something coherent.