I have a question since our resident Elmer seems to be on a roll:
When Nakman and I were playing the other evening I couldn’t see him on my map on APRSdroid. In fact I could only really see a handful of stations in the Denver metro area. Is there a way to get that data “pushed” more quickly? I have the time (station signal “age?”) set to two hours and same paths as Nak on his radio fwiw. I did try to search in aprsdroid to see if I could filter and display say only the -9 stations but I don’t think it can do that. Figured that might make it more efficient.
Logging onto aprs fi online I could see him and a bunch of other stations that weren’t showing up on my truck setup
A digipeater and an Igate are distinct functions that aren't required to be the same station and often are not. Drilling down even further there's receive-only Igates and bidirectional and different types of digipeaters such as high level and fill-in.
This is only to say that what your network looks like locally can differ from what APRS-IS thinks it looks like. Don't assume it should be a perfect 1:1. For one there's several Igates feeding into APRS-IS and you're just one station hearing just some small amount of the same traffic. You might agree closely with the Igate and/or digipeater closest to you but that's about it.
If not, first thing is simple, make sure you have done all you can do to dial in your antenna and location. Can't decode anything if you can't hear it in the first place. Digital radio is subject to the RF limitations, e.g. strong enough to have signal-to-noise to decode information.
Next is your modem. Most likely high level digis and primary Igates will have tuned their devices so it lands on you to do the same. In the case of canned APRS like an FTM-400 there's not much you can do since Yaesu already did what they did.
Since you're running an external TNC (modem) you have more flexibility. Put another way you've been given more than enough rope, now it's up to you to not hang yourself...
You want to geek out, start down the path to understanding pre-emphasis and de-emphasis, modulation index, deviation, twist, network timing.
Basically you might need to tweak levels and parameters to decode more. It's easier to optimize receive than transmit, so you got that going for you.