so ive been running APRS for about 8 months now with a TM-D710G and a Mobilinkd TNC hooked up to my HT as a backup, and i keep noticing on aprs.fi that my position beacons are showing up with duplicate entries like within seconds of each other. been trying to narrow down if its a path issue or if theres just two different igates hearing me and both uploading to the IS, which i guess is normal? but the timing is weird sometimes its like 4-5 seconds apart.

my current path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard for suburban use. ive read that you can cause extra duplication if your path is too aggressive but i dont think thats whats happening here. the D710 is set to smart beaconing with the sensitivity cranked up a bit more than defaults because i do a lot of stop and go driving and wanted better position granularity at intersections.

anyone else seen this or know if its actually a problem worth fixing? positions look accurate on the map its mostly just cosmetic annoyance but i want to make sure im not hammering the local digis more than i need to

yeah the duplicate igate thing is totally normal and not really something you can fix from your end. when two igates hear the same packet theyll both upload it to the APRS-IS and the server side is supposed to dedupe them but sometimes the timing is close enough that both slip through. 4-5 seconds apart sounds like just two igates with slightly different processing times, not a path problem.

that said WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 in a suburban area is fine, thats basically what everyone runs. if you were out in the boonies youd maybe go WIDE2-2 but in a dense area some people actually drop to just WIDE1-1 to reduce congestion. the smart beaconing thing with more aggressive settings can increase how many packets you throw out during stop-and-go which does put more load on the digis but honestly one station doing that isnt going to bring anything down.

if it really bugs you you can watch the raw packets on aprs.fi and see which igates are grabbing you, sometimes theres an obvious pattern

had the exact same thing happen when i first set up my rig. drove me crazy for like two weeks thinking something was misconfigured. turns out there were three igates within range of me and on a busy street corner i was getting heard by all of them lol. completely harmless. the APRS-IS does have duplicate supression but its based on a hash of the packet content and a time window and sometimes packets that are technically identical still slip through depending on which server handles them.

one thing i would double check is whether somehow you have two devices beaconing on 144.390 at the same time. like if both the D710 and the Mobilinkd setup are both active and set to the same callsign-SSID that could actually cause real problems beyond just cosmetic duplication. probably not whats happening but worth ruling out