so ive been messing with this for about three days now and im losing my mind a little. running a Kenwood TM-D710G into a Mobilinkd TNC3 (yeah i know the D710 has a built in TNC but i wanted to try the bluetooth setup with APRSDroid on my phone) and nothing is hitting aprs.fi. i can hear packets decoding fine in the app, like i can see other stations popping up around me so the receive side seems to be working, its just my own beacon that never shows.

i set my callsign with the right SSID (-9 since its in the vehicle), path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine around here, there are definitely igates within range because i can see them on the map. transmit audio level is probably where i should start looking but i really dont know how to verify that without another receiver to monitor myself.

anyone been down this road before? feels like its probably something dumb

the audio level thing is almost always it when the receive works but tx doesnt. the Mobilinkd has a calibration mode built into the app, i forget exactly where they hid it in the menus but theres a spot where it transmits a test tone and you can watch the deviation on a radio or use an SDR to monitor yourself. on the D710 specifically make sure youre going into the mic input on the external TNC jack and not just using the speaker out — easy to mix those up if you wired your own cable.

also double check APRSDroid is actually set to use the TNC3 as the connection and not APRS-IS over internet, because if its connected to the network directly itll receive just fine but youre not actually keying up the radio at all. ive seen that bite people more than once

what ptt method are you using on the TNC3, the vox or the actual CM108 ptt? vox can be real finicky and sometimes just doesnt trigger reliably especially if your beacon interval is set short and theres a lot of ambient noise on the input. i switched mine to the hardware ptt and it was just way more consistent. also worth pulling up direwolf or even just a baofeng on the output freq to literally listen for your own packets going out, that way you know for sure if the radio is even transmitting