so ive been fighting with this setup for like two weeks now and im at my wits end. Running a Kenwood TM-D710G which has the built-in TNC, got it set to 144.390 which is the standard APRS frequency here in North America, and i can see other stations fine on the display. the radio is beaconing, i can see the TX light flashing every few minutes, but nothing shows up on aprs.fi under my callsign.

I set the beacon interval to 5 minutes, SSID is set to -9 which i know is the mobile identifier, and i double checked the path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be pretty standard. the symbol is set to a car icon. everything looks right on the radio side but its like the packets are just disappearing into the void.

one thing i did notice is im in kind of a low spot, theres a hill to the north and most of the digipeaters in this area seem to be in that direction. would that cause every single packet to get eaten? or is there something im missing on the config side. i feel like ive read the manual three times at this point

yeah the terrain thing is probably your main culprit honestly. APRS is still just VHF so line of sight matters a lot and if a hill is between you and the nearest digi, your packets just never make it there to get repeated. WIDE1-1 is supposed to help with that since it triggers low-level digis first but if theres nothing on your side of the hill it doesnt matter.

One thing worth trying - there are a few websites where you can check digipeater coverage in your area, like aprs.fi itself has a map of heard stations and you can kind of figure out which digis are active near you. Also check if the TM-D710 has its audio levels set right, sometimes the internal TNC on those is a little finicky about the deviation and if its too low or too high the packets get garbled even if they're technically transmitted. There's a menu setting for that on the D710, i forget the exact number but its in the APRS setup menu.

had almost the exact same problem when i first got into APRS. turned out my symbol table character was wrong, i had the overlay set to something weird and i guess it was confusing the way aprs.fi was trying to display it. probably not your issue but worth a look. also sometimes aprs.fi just takes a while to show new stations, like if your callsign has never been seen before it might not appear right away, though two weeks seems long enough that shouldnt be the problem anymore.