so ive been messing with APRS for about 3 months now and i think i finally have a decent setup but something is off with the igate side of things. running a TM-D710G with the built in TNC, path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 and i can see my own packets on the waterfall coming back from the local digi about 2 miles away. aprs.fi shows me sometimes but its really inconsistent — like ill pop up for a few minutes then disappear for 20-30 mins even when im stationary at home.

the digi is definitely hitting my packets, i can see it in the raw data on aprs.fi when it does work, it shows the digi callsign in the path. but then it just stops. talked to the guy who runs the digi and he said its fine on his end but im not sure he actually checked. the igate is supposedly connected to APRS-IS but i have no way to verify that from my end.

is there some way to tell if the igate is actually passing packets upstream or is it dropping them? or is this maybe a path issue on my end. i feel like WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 should be fine for suburban area but maybe im stomping on something.

check aprsdirect.com in addition to aprs.fi — sometimes one will show packets the other misses, which can help you figure out if its an RF side problem vs the igate-to-IS connection. if the raw packets show up on aprsdirect but not aprs.fi that points to an APRS-IS feed issue downstream.

also your path is probably fine but depending on how congested the local RF channel is you might actually get better results dropping to just WIDE1-1 in a suburban area. the second hop can sometimes cause your packet to get gated multiple times and aprs.fi has deduplication logic that might be eating some of your position reports. worth trying for a day or two and seeing if your visibility improves.

the other thing id look at is your beacon rate. if youre stationary and beaconing every 10 minutes or whatever the default is, there might be timing collisions with other stations. smartbeaconing helps a lot when mobile but when parked just slowing down the rate and letting the digi do its thing usually clears it up.

had almost the exact same thing happen to me last year. turned out the igate near me was running some older software and would randomly drop its APRS-IS connection and not reconnect automatically. the operator didnt even know it was happening. you could see packets hitting the digi fine but they just werent making it to the internet.

honestly the easiest way to check is just run direwolf on a cheap raspberry pi or even an old laptop with a baofeng or something and set up your own igate. then you know for certain at least one igate in range is working and pushing to IS. takes maybe an afternoon to set up and then you stop depending on whoever maintains the local infrastructure.