so ive been trying to get my APRS setup working for about two weeks now and im losing my mind a little. the TNC is definitely keying the radio, i can see the PTT light on my 2m rig going on and off on the beacon interval, and when i put a scanner nearby i can hear the data burst. sounds like normal APRS audio to me. but nothing ever shows up on aprs.fi no matter how long i wait.

running a Mobilinkd TNC3 into a Kenwood TM-V71A, using APRSdroid on an old android phone. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. symbol is the little car icon. my grid square is EN52 which isnt exactly the middle of nowhere, theres definitely igates around because i can see other stations popping up near me on the map.

checked the audio levels a dozen times, tried adjusting the deviation on the radio, even borrowed a friends TNC just to rule out hardware. same result. starting to wonder if maybe my path is wrong or something with the callsign-SSID setup. using KD9XXX-9 which should be fine for a mobile. anyone run into this before or have ideas what else to check

few things come to mind. first, have you actually decoded your own packets locally? like with a separate receiver feeding into direwolf or even just aprsisce on a laptop? if the TNC is keying up but the audio going out is garbage or wrong level, the digipeaters wont decode it and it just vanishes. thats caught me before, everything looked fine from the shack side but the deviation was way off and nobody was hearing me.

also double check that APRSdroid has the right SSID set AND that its actually connected to the TNC and not trying to use internet beaconing as a fallback or something. ive seen that app do weird things depending on version. the Mobilinkd app itself has a decoded packets screen which is really useful for sanity checking, worth pulling that up and seeing what it says about your own transmissions if you havent already.

yeah what he said about decoding locally is the move. also just to throw this out there — aprs.fi can sometimes take a few minutes to show a new station, especially if youve never beaconed from that callsign before. but two weeks obviously rules that out lol.

one thing i dont see you mention is whether youve heard or seen any digipeaters actually picking you up. if you have a second radio you can throw on 144.390 and just listen, when a digi repeats a packet you usually hear it come back. if youre transmitting fine but no digi is relaying you then the problem is probably audio levels or timing. WIDE1-1 is supposed to hit fill-in digis first so theres probably a few of those in EN52. might also try just WIDE2-2 temporarily to see if that changes anything, sometimes path config in APRSdroid is finicky about how you type it in.