So ive been messing with APRS for about two weeks now and I cannot for the life of me get my beacon to show up consistently on aprs.fi. I'm running a TM-D710G with the internal TNC, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which I thought was pretty standard. I can hear other stations just fine and my radio is definitely transmitting - I can see the TX light hit when it beacons - but half the time it just doesn't show up, and when it does it's like 20-30 minutes delayed.

I'm in a semi-rural area, nearest igate I think is maybe 25 miles out? Not sure if that's the issue or if I have something misconfigured in the path settings. My beacon rate is set to 1 minute right now, thought that might help but honestly it might just be making things worse by flooding stuff. Any ideas what to look at first?

1 minute beacon rate is way too aggressive especially if you're already getting gated fine some of the time. Drop that to like 5 or even 10 minutes, you're just hammering the channel and probably causing collisions with other packets. The APRS channel around here gets pretty congested and short beacon intervals are a big part of why.

Also 25 miles to the nearest igate is rough but shouldn't be a total dealbreaker if you have decent terrain. What's your antenna situation? A lot of people run APRS on a rubber duck or some compromised antenna and then wonder why digis 20 miles out aren't hearing them. The D710G internal TNC is solid so I doubt that's the problem.

yeah the delay thing on aprs.fi is sometimes just the site being slow to update, I've seen it lag 15-20 min before and the packet was actually gated way earlier. you can check findu.com or even aprs.is directly to see raw packet timestamps if you want to know if it's actually being received vs just a display thing on the fi site.

also double check your SSID if you're using one, sometimes people set up the beacon and forget to look for the right callsign-SSID combo on the map