so ive been fighting this for a few days now and its starting to drive me crazy. my position beacon is showing up on aprs.fi maybe once every 45 minutes or so when it should be hitting every 10. running a TM-D710G with the built in TNC and ive got the SmartBeaconing settings configured the way i thought made sense — high speed threshold at 60mph, low speed at 3mph, and the corner pegging set to 25 degrees. been using this exact setup for like two years and it worked fine.

what changed is i upgraded to a new mag mount antenna last week and had to redo some of the cabling. not sure if thats related. the radio itself shows the packets being transmitted, the TX light flashes when i'd expect it to, but they just arent showing up on the network consistently. wondering if maybe a digi near me went down or something but i checked and W5XYZ-1 looks like its still hitting aprs.fi fine based on other stations showing through it.

anyone had something similar happen? is there a way to tell if my packets are actually making it to a digi or if theyre just dying in the air?

couple things worth checking — first, what path are you running? if youre on WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 that should be fine for most areas but ive seen people accidentally knock their path settings back to something too aggressive or too conservative after a menu reset. the 710G has that annoying habit of acting like everything is saved when it isnt always.

also check your audio levels if youre doing anything external, but since youre on the internal TNC that probably isnt it. more likely the antenna swap introduced an impedance mismatch that's affecting your deviation just enough to make packets decode poorly at the digi even though your radio thinks it's transmitting fine. you can pull up aprsdirect.com and filter to just your callsign with SSID and see what digis are actually hearing you and how often. that'll tell you pretty quick if its a path problem or a rf problem.

yeah that aprs.fi delay thing has burned me before and it wasnt even my setup, one of the IGates in my area had gone offline for like three days and nobody noticed. the map still looked active because there was historical data cached. definitely crosscheck against aprsdirect like the other guy said, or even just key up and watch for your packet to appear in realtime on there — it refreshes way faster than aprs.fi does.

also random thought but did you check the PL on your output after the antenna work? i know thats not directly APRS related but if you bumped a connector and youre now running into the digi with weird audio it could cause issues decoding on their end even if your power looks fine locally