okay so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and i think i finally have a decent setup going but something is still off and i cant figure out if its my path settings or if the local digi is just garbage. running a TM-D710G with a mag mount on the car, 1200 baud, WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path, beacon interval at 60 seconds. i can see myself on aprs.fi when im close to town but once i get out on the highway about 20-30 miles east it just drops off completely. checked the coverage map for the area and there should be a digi up on the ridge but maybe its not working right? or is 60 second intervals too slow and my packets just arent getting through when there's QRM? also tried switching to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2 for a bit but that just felt like i was being that guy flooding the channel with redundant packets so i switched back. anyway if anyone has run APRS in semi-rural terrain and dealt with spotty digi coverage id love to hear what you actually do.

the path thing is almost certainly not your problem if you're already getting into digis in town — WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is pretty much the standard and anything beyond that is just network abuse honestly. what i'd look at first is whether that ridge digi is actually on the air. you can check it on aprs.fi directly, just search for the digi's callsign and see when it last heard anything or transmitted. if it hasnt shown activity in a while it might be down or somebody just hasn't maintained it. happens a lot with volunteer-maintained infrastructure out in rural areas, nobody notices for months sometimes.

also 60 seconds is actually on the longer side for mobile. a lot of guys run 30 seconds or even use SmartBeaconing so the rate adapts to speed and direction changes. wont help if theres no digi to hit but its worth tweaking once you sort the infrastructure side.

had almost the exact same issue on a stretch of I-80 out here. turns out the digi i thought was covering that area had been running with a misconfigured alias for like two years and wasnt actually digipeating WIDE paths at all, just its own direct callsign stuff. ended up finding out by posting in the local club mailing list and someone who maintained it had no idea it was broken. so yeah, definitely worth reaching out to whoever owns that ridge site if you can figure out who it is from the beacon text or the aprs.fi station info. sometimes just asking fixes it faster than troubleshooting your own gear.