so i finally got my VX-8GR set up with APRS and its been working great for tracking but apparently im beaconing every 30 seconds and the local repeater guys are losing their minds. i didnt realize the default settings were that aggressive, i thought smart beaconing was supposed to handle that automatically but maybe i set it up wrong.

im mostly using it while mobile, driving around town, occasionally hiking. i dont really need people to see my position update that frequently, every couple minutes seems fine to me. but im also not totally sure how smart beaconing actually calculates the rate - is it based on speed and direction change? because sometimes when im just sitting parked it still seems to fire off packets constantly.

also someone mentioned i should check what path im using, i just left it on the default which i think is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 but honestly i dont fully understand how the path stuff works yet. any advice appreciated, dont want to be that guy on the network

yeah the path thing is probably part of your issue too. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine for mobile out in rural areas where you need the fill-in digis, but in a city or suburban area thats going to get you retransmitted a ton of times and flood things up. a lot of urban ops just run WIDE1-1 or even direct only if you're near an igate. worth looking at aprs.fi and seeing how many times your packets are actually being digi'd.

on the smart beaconing side, yes its speed and corner pegging - so if you're sitting still it should back way off, like eventually going to something like every 10-30 minutes depending on settings. but on the VX-8 the smart beaconing config is kind of buried and the defaults arent always what you'd expect. i'd check if smart beaconing is actually enabled in the menu, not just selected but actually turned on. mine had it selected but wasnt actually doing anything until i dug into the sub menus.

30 seconds is brutal lol, yeah that'll annoy people fast. when i started with APRS i did something similar, had no idea the network was shared and that every packet gets repeated across like half the region. once i understood that i felt pretty bad about it.

honestly for just casual mobile and hiking use you could probably get away with a much simpler setup - even a fixed 2 or 3 minute beacon interval would be totally fine and nobody would care. smart beaconing is nice in theory but i find it adds a layer of complexity thats not always worth it when youre just starting out. get the basics working first then tune from there