so ive been fighting this for about three days now and im starting to lose my mind a little. running a kenwood TM-D710G with the internal TNC, got it set up as a tracker on 144.390, the radio is definitely keying up when it should — i can hear the burst, sounds like good AX.25 audio — but i go to aprs.fi and nothing. not even a partial decode. my callsign just isnt there.

i checked the path and its set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area, theres a couple i-gates within like 20 miles. beacon rate is set to every 5 minutes. the symbol is the car icon. honestly i dont know what else to check. is there a way to decode my own packets locally to verify the audio is actually good before it hits the air? wondering if maybe the deviation is off on the 9600 baud port vs the packet port or something. or maybe my path is getting digi'd but not gated for some reason.

anyone dealt with this before

yeah this is actually pretty common with the D710, the audio level for the internal TNC can be finicky. what i'd do first is grab a copy of Direwolf on a laptop and just listen to 144.390 for a while — if your local digis are up you'll start seeing decode attempts in the log and can tell right away if the signal is being heard. if your own packets show up decoded in Direwolf then the problem is downstream, probably an igate configuration or your packets are getting digi'd but the igate is filtering them for some reason.

also double check you have a comment or status text in the beacon, some igates are weird about gating packets with empty fields, probably not the issue but worth ruling out. and make sure your SSID isnt already in use on another station nearby, had a buddy who had his handheld set to the same SSID as his mobile and aprs.fi was only showing one of them.

check if there's an igate near you that's set to RF-only gating or has a range filter. some igates wont gate packets from stations that are already heard by another igate, its the IS-to-RF duplicate prevention thing but it works both ways and can cause this exact symptom where youre being digi'd fine but never hit the internet. you can actually verify this by looking at the raw packets tab on aprs.fi for nearby digipeaters and see if your callsign shows up in anyone elses heard list.