so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and i finally got my Kenwood TM-D710G set up and beaconing but when i check aprs.fi my position either shows up super late or sometimes not at all. the digipeater i can see on the map is only like 8 miles away and i know its hitting it because i can see my packets getting digi'd on the RF side when i monitor 144.390, but they just dont seem to be making it to the internet.

im running WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path which i thought was the standard thing to do around here. ive got the beacon rate set to every 5 minutes which felt reasonable. not sure if the issue is the igate side or if my path is somehow wrong. also not totally clear on whether the digipeater and igate are the same station or if those are two different things - i kind of assumed they were combined but maybe thats my whole problem right there

anyone dealt with something like this or know what to look for

yeah digipeaters and igates are definitely two separate functions - a lot of stations run both but plenty of them only digi without igating anything to the internet. so your packets might be getting repeated just fine over RF but if the igate covering that area is down or doesn't have good coverage of your digipeater's output then nothing gets to aprs-is.

easiest thing to do is go to aprs.fi and search for your callsign then click on the raw packets tab - it'll show you what path each packet actually took to get there and which igate received it. if you're seeing big gaps its probably an igate coverage hole. also check APRS Direct or findu to see if theres any igate activity near you, sometimes a site that looks covered on paper just has one igate thats been offline for weeks and nobody noticed. your path looks fine by the way, WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is totally appropriate for mobile or home use in most areas.

one more thing - if you have a way to run Direwolf on a separate machine even just a pi, you could set it up as your own igate and solve the coverage problem yourself. thats how i ended up going down that rabbit hole, had the same issue a couple years back and just stood up my own igate. now i see half the county's traffic which is kind of entertaining honestly. APRS messaging actually works pretty reliably once you get the whole chain sorted out.