so ive been messing around with APRS for a few months now and got my TNC-Pi talking to direwolf on a raspberry pi and everything seems to be working, im seeing packets come in on aprs.fi and i can track my car when im driving around which is cool. but now im reading about igates vs digipeaters and im starting to confuse myself.

from what i understand the igate just pushes packets to the internet (APRS-IS) and the digipeater actually retransmits RF packets so other stations can reach further. i've been running mine as RX-only igate mostly because i didnt want to cause interference or mess anything up while i was still learning. but my coverage area is kinda rural and theres a gap between two digipeaters that my path sometimes falls into and i lose tracking for like 20 minutes on a drive.

would it make sense to enable digipeating on my setup or is that something that needs more thought about paths and stuff? i dont really wanna cause QRM or be the guy who breaks everyones packets. also does anyone run a combined setup without issues or is it usually better to keep them separate

yeah running both on the same machine is totally doable and actually pretty common for home stations. direwolf handles it fine, just gotta make sure your config is set up right — the DIGIPEAT line in direwolf.conf is where you define what you'll relay and with what alias. most people just set WIDE1-1 and WIDE2-1 aliases to start and leave it at that.

the thing you do wanna think about is your antenna situation and how close you are to existing digipeaters. if theres already good coverage nearby and you start digipeating too you can create what they call a "coverage hole" by actually re-transmitting packets that then confuse the path counting downstream. theres a decent write-up on the WB4APR site about network design that helped me understand it. the short version is, if youre filling a genuine gap like you described, enabling WIDE1-1 digipeating (not WIDE2-2 which is usually reserved for hilltop sites) is probably the right call and wont cause much harm if your power is modest and antenna isnt huge.

rx-only igates are great but they dont help a mobile station actually get its packet out when its in a dead zone, they only hear it if it gets there somehow. so yeah id look at the digipeater side of things for your specific problem.

im running both on a pi4 with a kenwood TM-V71A and it works pretty well. one thing i noticed is if you go the digipeater route keep an eye on your TX delay setting in direwolf, had mine set too high at first and it was causing all sorts of collisions that i didnt notice until a buddy of mine checked aprs.fi and pointed out my packets were mangling other peoples stuff. dropped it to around 150ms and things cleaned up a lot.

also just a heads up aprs.fi doesnt always show you whats really happening on RF, its worth having a second receiver just listening and using a waterfall to see whats actually going out. i use an rtl-sdr for monitoring while the main rig transmits.