so ive been fighting this for about two weeks now and im pretty sure im close but something is still off. running a TM-D710G in the shack connected to a dedicated 2m antenna on the roof, about 25ft of LMR-400 so loss should be minimal. i can see my beacon going out on the radio display and the rig is definitely transmitting — i can hear the packet burst on a nearby scanner. the local digi is only about 8 miles away line of sight, maybe a little less, and i can see OTHER stations getting gated to aprs.fi just fine but mine never shows up there.

path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which from what i read should be pretty standard. SSID is -9 because im mostly using it mobile but right now parked at home. my symbol is set to a car which is maybe confusing but whatever.

one thing i noticed is i can occasionally see the digi ACKing stuff but not sure if thats related to messaging or just normal digi behavior. is there some setting in the TM-D710 that would cause it to tx but not actually format the packet right? i feel like i went through the menu a hundred times but maybe i missed something with the callsign entry or the SSID setup. any ideas appreciated

first thing id check is whether your callsign is entered correctly in the radio — not just displayed right but actually transmitted right. on the D710 theres the MYCALL setting in the packet menu and ive seen people have it set correctly on the main screen but somehow have an old or wrong entry buried in the TNC settings. connect it to a laptop with a terminal program and just watch what it actually spits out when it beacons, that'll tell you real fast if the packet structure is malformed or if the callsign is getting garbled.

also worth checking — is your audio level set right for the internal TNC? the D710 has an internal TNC so its not like you have a separate device to tune but there's still a setting in the menus for the packet speed, make sure it's on 1200 baud since that's what APRS uses on 144.390. 9600 baud wont get digi'd properly by most infrastructure. that trips people up sometimes because the radio can switch modes and you don't always notice.

yeah what he said about the baud rate — i made that exact mistake when i first got mine. but also, have you tried RF-only monitoring? like pull up aprsisce32 or even just watch aprsdirect.com with RF filtering on to see if your packets are being heard by anyone at all, doesnt have to be your local igate. if nobody's hearing you on RF either then its probably a TX issue or packet format issue. if people hear you on RF but youre not getting gated thats a different problem probably with the igate itself or your path.

WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine btw, dont change that. some people overthink the path stuff.