so i got my TM-D710G set up in the truck about three weeks ago and have been running APRS pretty much full time on 144.390. been loving it, watching myself move around on aprs.fi, messaging a buddy across town, all that stuff. really cool to see the digipeaters picking me up.

anyway ran into a guy at the club meeting last night who said i was 'flooding the channel' because my beacon interval is set to 30 seconds. i honestly didnt know that was considered rude? i thought SmartBeaconing was supposed to handle that dynamically but im not 100% sure i have it configured right on the radio. the manual is kind of confusing about it. is 30 seconds fixed interval actually that bad when youre driving around? i figured moving stations need more frequent updates but maybe im wrong here. what do you guys run for intervals

yeah 30 seconds fixed is pretty aggressive, especially if youre sitting still. the whole point of SmartBeaconing is it slows way down when you're parked and speeds up when youre turning or accelerating. if its set to fixed 30 sec that means SmartBeaconing isnt actually active. on the D710 you have to go into the APRS settings and explicitly enable it, its not on by default if i remember right. i think the menu is like APRS > SmartBeaconing and theres a toggle. once thats on you set a low speed threshold like 5mph and a high speed like 60mph and let it figure out the interval between those. most people do maybe 5 min when stationary and down to like 30-60 sec when moving fast and turning. way better for the network and honestly gives better track resolution on corners anyway.

the guy at your club was probably right but also kinda depends on how busy your local digi is. out here in the middle of nowhere nobody cares if i beacon every 20 seconds lol. but yeah in a metro area with a lot of stations on the network you can cause some real collisions and it gets annoying on the RF side. i run SmartBeaconing on my VX-8DR and it works pretty well. one thing tho -- even with SmartBeaconing on you still want to sanity check what its actually transmitting by watching aprs.fi for a bit. sometimes the settings are weird out of the box