so ive been messing with APRS for about three weeks now and i cant figure out why my packets arent showing up on aprs.fi. the digipeater about 8 miles from me is clearly hearing me because i can see it in the raw packets when i pull up a nearby igate, but none of my position reports are actually making it onto the map.

running a TM-D710G into Dire Wolf on a raspberry pi, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. beacon rate is every 2 minutes. the symbol is set correctly as far as i can tell, using the house symbol since im just doing home station stuff for now. RF seems fine, im hitting the digi no problem.

my best guess is maybe the igate near me is RF-only and not actually connected to APRS-IS? or maybe theres a filter issue on the server side? i honestly dont know enough about how the igate to internet part works to debug this properly. anyone dealt with something like this

yeah that sounds like an igate issue not a you issue. a lot of older igates are still running without internet gating enabled or the sysop just hasnt kept up with the config. you can actually check on aprs.fi by searching for the digi callsign and seeing if it shows up as an igate or just a digipeater — there's a difference in how they show up. if its just relaying RF packets but not connected to APRS-IS then your packets go nowhere as far as the internet is concerned.

also worth double checking your SSID situation. are you running -9 for mobile or just your base callsign? shouldnt matter but ive seen weird filtering behavior before. the other thing i'd do is temporarily crank your beacon rate way down to like every 10 minutes so you're not flooding the channel while you debug, neighbors appreciate that even if they cant hear you complaining about it

check if the igate is actually connecting to a tier 2 server. you can look at the igate stats on aprs.fi if it ever gated anything. had this exact problem last year, turned out the igate 6 miles from me was running some ancient version of UI-View and the guy running it had moved away, nobody maintaining it anymore. ended up just standing up my own igate with Dire Wolf since i was already running it anyway. took like an hour once i found the right aprx config docs.