so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and overall its working okay but i cant figure out why my packets seem to die after like one or two hops. im running a TM-D710G with the internal TNC and using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 as my path which from everything ive read should be pretty standard. i can see myself hitting the local digi and sometimes one more out but then nothing, my symbol just stops showing up on aprs.fi beyond maybe 40-50 miles.

i checked my path settings probably six times, everything looks right. power is 50 watts into a vertical on the roof with a decent ground plane, so RF shouldnt really be the issue. neighbor down the road with a VX-8 shows up all over the map so its not like the network is dead here.

one thing i noticed is that when i send a message through the APRS-IS gateway it goes fine, so at least that part works. its really just the RF hop propagation thats bugging me. anyone seen this before or have ideas what to poke at next?

check if the digis in your area are actually set up to handle WIDE1-1 vs WIDE2-2. some of the older installs around here only pass WIDE2-n and wont act on the WIDE1-1 at all unless they're specifically configured as fill-in digis. you can actually verify this by pulling up aprs.fi and clicking on a packet that does make it through -- itll show you the path it actually took and which digis touched it. if you're only seeing one digi in the path it tells you a lot.

also worth checking if maybe the digi closest to you is set to a low power or has a crippled path limit. some sysops cap hops at 1 even if you request 2, which is honestly fine network practice but can make you think somethings broken when its not.

yeah this drove me nuts for a while too. turned out in my case the issue was the TNC was sending duplicate packets because i had both the radio's internal APRS mode AND Xastir running at the same time both trying to key up. the digis were probably dropping the dupes. dont ask me how long it took me to figure that one out lol. probably not your issue since you said its just the internal TNC but worth double checking nothing else is keying the radio.