so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and i think i finally have a decent setup going but theres one thing thats been driving me nuts. my TM-D710G is beaconing fine, i can see my own packets on the radio display and aprs.fi shows me moving around when i drive which is great. the problem is when im at home parked the igate near me (about 8 miles out) doesnt seem to be picking me up consistently. sometimes itll show up on aprsfi sometimes not. i checked the path and im running WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was standard for most situations. RF level is set to high on the radio, antenna is a 5/8 wave colinear on the roof. the digi i can see on the map is definitely active because other stations are hitting it fine.

one thing i noticed is my beacon rate is set to every 5 minutes which seemed reasonable but maybe thats too slow? or could it be an issue with the squelch decode on the digi? i really dont know where to start troubleshooting this. any ideas would be appreciated

few things to check - first, the path WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine for mobile but if youre sitting at home stationary and not moving, smart beaconing is probably cutting your rate way down. the TM-D710 has smart beaconing built in and if you stopped moving it might only be beaconing every 30 minutes or whatever you have the slow rate set to, not every 5 min. that would explain the inconsistency on aprsfi.

also 8 miles to the nearest igate is actually not that bad but it depends on terrain a lot. if youre in a valley or have buildings in the way the digi might only be catching you occasionally. i had a similar issue and ended up just checking RF heard list on the digi owners page to see if my packets were actually making it to the digi even if they werent getting gated. thats usually the first thing to figure out - are you hitting the digi at all or is it a gating issue on the backend.

yeah what he said about smart beaconing. also worth checking - is the igate running on a frequency thats actually in range of your digi? sounds dumb but ive seen cases where the local digi is filling and dropping packets before they make it to an igate. not super common but happens. 144.390 is the standard in north america so assuming youre on that youre probably fine there.

honestly though aprs at home stationary is just kinda hit or miss depending on your local infrastructure. if the coverage map on aprs.fi shows you in a weak area for igates theres not a ton you can do short of setting up your own igate which honestly isnt that hard with a raspberry pi and direwolf. i did mine in an afternoon and now i actually understand how the whole thing hangs together way better than when i was just using the radio standalone.