so ive been messing with this for about three days now and im losing my mind a little. running a Kenwood TM-D710G with the built in TNC, got it set to beacon every 10 minutes on 144.390, SSID is set right as far as I can tell, the radio shows the packet going out in the log, but when I pull up aprs.fi and search my callsign nothing shows up. not even old data. my buddy two miles away can see his own packets just fine.

I double checked the audio levels, PTT seems to be keying, I can actually hear the packet burst go out over the air. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. not sure what im missing here. is there some kind of validation or registration thing on aprs.fi I dont know about? or is this more likely a digipeater coverage issue in my neighborhood. I'm in a pretty suburban area but there's supposed to be a few igates within range according to the map.

yeah the D710 can be a little finicky with the audio path on the internal TNC sometimes. first thing id check is whether an igate is actually hearing you vs just a digi. a digi alone wont get you on aprs.fi, you need an igate in the path to push it to the internet. try pulling up aprs.fi and zooming into your area and look at the little antenna icons, those are igates. if the nearest one is like 20 miles away on the other side of a hill thats probably your answer. also worth checking if your path is actually being gated or just repeated by a digi that has no igate downstream.

another thing, and this sounds dumb but check that your symbol and position data is actually being included in the packet. ive seen setups where the beacon goes out but its just a status packet with no lat/lon in it so aprs.fi has nothing to plot.

RF path issue is my first guess too. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine but if there's no igate actually receiving you directly or via a digi then it just dies on the RF side and never hits the internet. I had basically the same thing happen when I moved, took me a week to figure out the nearest igate had been offline for months and nobody bothered to update the map.

try running APRSISCE/32 or even Direwolf on a laptop with a cheap RTL-SDR and just listen on 144.390 for a while. if you can decode your own packets locally then the radio and TNC side is working and its definitely a coverage/igate problem not a config problem.