so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and got my beacon working pretty solid, showing up on aprs.fi with good position reports every few minutes which is great. but the messaging part is just completely broken for me and i cant figure out if its my setup or something with the network.

im running a TM-D710G with a Raspberry Pi running direwolf as a secondary igate at home, and i also have the radio itself set up with its built in TNC. when i try to send messages to other stations i can see the packets going out in direwolf's output, they get acked sometimes, but the people im trying to reach say they never got anything. i tried messaging WB4APR just to see if the message robot thing would bounce back and nothing came back either.

is there some setting im missing with the message path or something? i have the path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine i think. been googling this for days and half the stuff i find is like 10 years old and i dont know if its still relevant.

the path thing is worth double checking but honestly messaging on APRS has always been kinda flaky in my experience. one thing to check is whether the igates in your area are actually igating messages both directions — a lot of igates are RF-to-internet only and wont pass messages back down to RF. thats usually the culprit when you can see your packets going out but the other end never gets them.

also the aprs.fi message interface has been weird lately, not sure if that affects WB4APR's message server or not. try messaging a local station who you know is definitely on RF and watching their radio and see if that works, that'll help narrow down if its a local rf problem or an igate problem.

yeah what the previous guy said about bidirectional igating is the thing. i ran into this exact same issue when i set up my first igate. most igates running aprx or even some direwolf configs are only listening and not gating back down. look at aprs.fi and find the igates near you, click on them and see if it says RF-only or bidirectional. if all your local ones are RF-only then messages from the internet side are just never gonna make it back to RF and to whoever your trying to reach. its kind of a frustrating gap in APRS infrastructure honestly, not enough people running full bidirectional igates.