so ive been running a TNC-Pi on a raspberry pi with direwolf for a few months now and everything seemed fine, packets were decoding locally and i could see them in the direwolf output but then i noticed nothing was actually making it to aprs.fi. spent like two evenings staring at the config before i even thought to check if the igate was actually connected to the server.

turns out my filter string was malformed and direwolf was just silently not connecting to the APRS-IS tier2 server. no error that i noticed anyway. once i fixed the filter it started pushing packets almost immediately. but now im seeing some packets decoded locally that never show up on aprs.fi even with decent signal, wondering if thats normal or if theres still something wrong. these are mobile stations passing through so maybe they just dont have enough coverage from other digis to make it all the way in.

also curious if anyone is running a receive-only igate vs a full digi+igate combo and what your thoughts are on that. i dont have a great antenna situation for transmitting so im thinking maybe just focus on the igate side for now.

the missing packets thing is pretty normal honestly. if the station is just passing through and only hits your igate once or twice with marginal signal, aprs.fi might not pick it up depending on how the IS servers are deduplicating. also worth checking if those mobiles are running 1200 baud on 144.390 or if someones being weird and running a different config. direwolf will decode it either way but the path matters a lot for whether it propgates.

for the receive-only igate question, yeah thats totally valid. a well placed rx-only igate can actually be more useful than a crappy digi in some cases. if your antenna situation is limited just run the igate, watch your RF heard stats on aprs.fi and see what youre pulling in. you can always add the digi side later when you have a better antenna up.

yeah i went through almost the exact same thing when i first set up direwolf. the APRS-IS connection failures can be really quiet about dying, i ended up writing a little watchdog script that checks if the last packet was more than like 10 minutes ago and restarts the service if not. probably overkill but it gives me peace of mind.

one thing to double check - what are you using for your callsign SSID on the igate? if youre using -10 or something non-standard some servers get picky. i use -10 personally and it works fine but ive heard of weirdness. also make sure your beacon interval isnt set too aggressive or youll get filtered by some servers.