so ive been running APRS for about 3 months now with a TM-D710G and Direwolf on a raspberry pi as a software TNC, and im seeing my beacon show up on RF locally but it never makes it to aprs.fi which is driving me nuts. the digipeater about 4 miles away is clearly hearing me because i can see it in the raw packets on my own receiver, it rebroadcasts my stuff with the WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path like its supposed to, but nothing ever shows up on the APRS-IS side.

ive been messing with the path settings and tried WIDE1-1 only, tried WIDE2-2, even tried just hitting the igate directly but i honestly dont know if there even is a local igate covering my area or if the digipeater is just a dumb repeater with no internet connection. is there a way to check which digis in my area are actually igates vs just RF digipeaters? i looked on aprs.fi but its hard to tell from the map view

yeah that's a pretty common situation actually — lots of areas have digipeaters that are just RF only with no igate function at all. the easiest way to check is go to aprs.fi and search for stations near you, then click on any digi you see and look at the station info. if it shows packets being gated to APRS-IS it'll usually have that in the comment field or you can look at its heard list. another thing i do is check findu.com, bit old school but you can search by callsign and see what stations have heard you and whether any of them are igates.

also worth joining the local ham club mailing list or checking with whoever maintains the infrastructure in your area, sometimes the igate is there but running on a slightly different frequency or the person who runs it just hasnt updated the config in years and its basically dead. your path looks fine by the way, WIDE1-1 WIDE2-1 is the standard recommendation for most areas.

Direwolf has a built in igate function if you want to just run your own, that way you dont have to rely on someone elses infrastructure. I did this when i moved out to a more rural area and the nearest igate was like 30 miles away. you just need a decent internet connection and you configure the IGSERVER line in your direwolf.conf to point at one of the rotate servers. took me maybe 20 minutes to get working and now my packets show up on aprs.fi no problem. downside is obviously you need the pi to stay online but sounds like you already have that setup anyway.