so ive been messing with APRS for a few weeks now and i just cant figure out why my beacons arent showing up on aprs.fi. i can hear traffic on 144.390 just fine, my TM-D710G is set up with the internal TNC active, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1, and i can see the TX light flashing when it should be transmitting. the symbol is set to a house icon for home station use. ive got my callsign and SSID entered correctly as far as i can tell.

the weird thing is i DID show up once like two days ago, just a single position report, and then nothing since. my QTH is kinda suburban so theres definitely digipeaters in range, i can see W3XYZ-3 and a couple others decoding on the waterfall. tried bumping my beacon rate down to every 10 minutes thinking maybe i was getting rate-limited somehow but still nothing. anyone dealt with this before or know what to actually check

first thing id check is whether your audio levels are calibrated right for the TNC. the D710 internal TNC is decent but it can be fussy about the deviation, and if youre overdriving it the packets will decode garbage on the other end even though your TX light looks fine locally. there's a built in packet monitor mode on that radio — turn it on and watch what youre actually decoding vs what you think youre sending.

also double check the path. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is standard and should be fine but i've seen people accidentally fat-finger WIDE1-1 as WIDE1-2 which screws everything up and wastes hops. the one-time beacon you saw two days ago might have just gotten lucky hitting a digi at the right moment if your signal is marginal. id also look at what RF range the nearest digi is claiming to cover and see if youre actually inside it, sometimes the coverage maps on aprs.fi for individual digis are optimistic.

yeah the D710 internal TNC thing is something I fought with for a while too. one thing that bit me was i had the wrong baud rate set somewhere deep in the menu — it was doing 9600 when the network expects 1200 on VHF APRS. probably not your issue if you were ever decoded but worth a look. also are you using the APRS mode through the front panel UI or did you hook up a computer and use APRSIS32 or something over the serial port? because if both are trying to key the radio at the same time that can cause weird one-off behavior like what you described.