so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and i thought i had a pretty good handle on it but something is driving me crazy. my position beacons are showing up on aprs.fi when i check from my phone but they're coming through other digipeaters in the area, not my own setup. i have a TNC-Pi running on a raspberry pi connected to my old IC-2300H and i configured Direwolf as the iGate and digipeater combo. the path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be pretty standard.

the weird part is i can see OTHER stations getting iGated through my station just fine, packets are flowing, the logs look normal. but my own transmitted packets never seem to come through my iGate. i vaguely remember reading something about how iGates are supposed to filter out their own heard packets or something to avoid duplication on the APRS-IS network but i cant remember if thats a Direwolf setting or just how the protocol works. anyone dealt with this before? been digging through the Direwolf user guide for an hour and my eyes are glazing over

yeah this is actually by design and it tripped me up too when i first set up my iGate. Direwolf (and most iGate software honestly) wont forward packets from stations it hears directly on RF if those packets are already making it to APRS-IS through other paths — it's an anti-duplicate thing baked into how the network is supposed to work. so your beacon is probably getting picked up by surrounding digis and hitting the IS that way, which is exactly what you're seeing on aprs.fi.

if you want to verify your OWN iGate is the one doing the work you'd have to be somewhere where you're not reachable by any other digi, which kind of defeats the purpose. the better question is whether your iGate is actually digipeating for other stations in your area and from what you said it sounds like it is, so honestly you're probably fine. check the IGFILTER line in your Direwolf config too, sometimes that catches things unexpectedly.

what he said. also dont stress too much about seeing your own packets through your own gate, aprs.fi aggregates from everywhere so as long as your position is populating you're good. i spent way too long troubleshooting something that wasnt actually broken when i started out with this stuff. one thing worth double checking though — make sure your MYCALL in Direwolf matches exactly what you're transmitting from your radio, sometimes people have like a different SSID set on one end and wonder why things look off in the logs.