Mountain Ham

WAZ took me way longer than DXCC did, just a heads up. some of those zones are genuinely rare and you might wait a long time for an activation. zone 2 was the last one i needed and i sat on 39 zones for like two years. so if youre newer i'd probably start with WAS or DXCC mixed just to get the momentum going and understand how the whole confirmation system works before you get into zone chasing which can be kinda maddening

so ive been trying to get APRS working for a few weeks now and im pulling my hair out a little. running a TM-D710G in the shack connected to a vertical outside, and i can SEE packets coming in on the display, i can hear the digipeaters doing their thing, but my own position just never shows up on aprs.fi no matter what i do. ive got the path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which seems to be what everyone recommends and my callsign-SSID is set correctly as far as i can tell. beacon interval is every 2 minutes. TX audio is going out, i can see the TX light flash. honestly not sure what to check next, its like the packets are going into the void.
one thing i noticed is that sometimes the radio beacons and i dont hear anything come back from a digi, not even an echo. but other times i do hear a digi respond. so maybe its intermittent? or maybe im just not understanding how the path works. any ideas appreciated, this has been bugging me for like 3 weeks at this point.

i just use a mag mount on my SUV and honestly for hitting repeaters around town it does the job, but i think if i was doing a fresh install on something i planned to keep id probably just drill it. the mag mount does scratch the roof over time even with a pad under it, my old car had marks from it after a couple years. anyway congrats on the new truck that thing is probably sweet

Classic problem with digital VFOs in sensitive receivers. Try adding some ferrite beads on the power and I2C lines, and consider switching away from the MAX7219 display - those things are notorious noise generators. I had good luck with a simple LCD display instead.

the band edge thing is actually really important and a lot of new generals get caught on this. your carrier frequency isnt the only thing that matters — an SSB signal takes up maybe 2.4-3 kHz of bandwidth, so if you set your dial to 7.300 you're actually splattering signal above the band edge and technically out of your allocation. most people say stay at least 3 kHz below the upper edge to be safe, so like 7.297 or lower if you're on upper sideband.
as for the 7.175 vs 7.225 thing, the FCC updated the allocations back in 2012 i think and generals got a chunk of the phone portion expanded down. so 7.175 is correct for where general phone starts now, 7.225 was the old limit. the ARRL band plan chart on their website should have the current version, just make sure youre not looking at a cached old page or something.

omg yes i was on 10m too and i had no idea what was happening at first lol, im still pretty new to HF and i just got my general a few months ago so i havent really seen a real band opening before. my elmer told me 10m was kind of hit or miss near the bottom of the solar cycle but we're heading up now i guess? it was actually kind of overwhelming trying to figure out who to call. ended up just listening mostly but i did make one contact with a guy in Chile which is the furthest i've ever reached so that was pretty cool for me even if its normal for everyone else here

omg yes i was on 10m too and i had no idea what was happening at first lol, im still pretty new to HF and i just got my general a few months ago so i havent really seen a real band opening before. my elmer told me 10m was kind of hit or miss near the bottom of the solar cycle but we're heading up now i guess? it was actually kind of overwhelming trying to figure out who to call. ended up just listening mostly but i did make one contact with a guy in Chile which is the furthest i've ever reached so that was pretty cool for me even if its normal for everyone else here

the x50a is a solid antenna, no issues there. the thing is you're probably only getting around 3 dBd on 2m with that antenna so a longer collinear isnt going to get you dramatically more — maybe another 2-3 dB if youre lucky and the pattern stays clean. for a 55 mile path to a repeater input thats probably not gonna make the difference you need.
honestly a yagi pointed at that repeater is the right answer if that link matters to you. doesnt have to be huge, even a 5 element yagi on 2m is going to give you 7-8 dBd and a tighter pattern which is exactly what you want for a specific path. you could just mount it fixed in that direction and keep the x50a for everything local. two antennas, a duplexer or a switch, done. i ran something similar for years before i put up a rotator — the fixed yagi actually worked better for that one path because i wasnt constantly fiddling with anything

i went through exactly this about 18 months ago. ended up going the 4x17 element yagi route because i had the yard space and i was intimidated by the dish tracking stuff. first actual contact took me a few weekends of messing with the setup to get right, mostly feedline issues and the LNA wasnt seated right at the connector so i was getting more noise than i should have been.
one thing nobody really told me upfront was how much the moon's position matters for your takeoff angle. i have some trees to the east and theres a solid window of maybe 3-4 hours where the moon is in clear sky from my QTH, so i basically plan everything around that. the EME2 or Heavens-Above sites help a lot for planning but you gotta walk your yard at different times and just look at where the obstacles actually are. sounds obvious but i wasted a whole activity weekend before i figured out my best window.