so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now with a TM-D710G and a pretty decent antenna setup, 5/8 wave on the roof. my beacon is definitely getting digipeated and showing up on aprs.fi no problem, i can watch myself move around the map when im mobile which is cool. but the messaging part just doesnt seem to work reliably at all.

tried sending a message to another local ham yesterday who was also showing up on the map, so i know he was active, and it just sat there as unacknowledged. he said he never got it. we were both hitting the same digipeater so im not sure whats going on. i checked my path and im using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for this area right?

is APRS messaging just kind of unreliable in general or am i missing something in my config? i went through the menu on the radio like three times and cant find anything obviously wrong

APRS messaging is honestly kind of hit or miss depending on network conditions and yeah the path matters a lot. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine and pretty standard but the real question is whether the digipeaters in your area are running IGate as well. if theres no IGate in range then messaging to someone whos connected via the internet side just wont work at all, the packet stays RF-only and never touches APRS-IS.

also worth checking if the other guy had message capable firmware or if hes just running a tracker. some setups beacon fine but dont actually have message ack turned on. the TM-D710G should be doing acks automatically but ive seen weird configs where that got turned off somehow.

try messaging someone you know for sure is running a full igate setup and see if that changes anything. also aprs.fi will show you the raw packets if you look at the station info, can tell you a lot about whats actually hitting the network

yeah messaging on APRS is kind of the unloved stepchild of the whole system lol. works great when it works but theres so many places it can fall apart. one thing i ran into on my D710 was that i had the TNC set to the wrong mode, think it was in kiss mode or something from when i was experimenting with a raspberry pi setup and i never put it back properly. radio was beaconing fine because that was going through a different path but the message handling was all messed up.

also just generally RF congestion can kill acks, if your packet collides enough times the remote station just gives up retrying. not much you can do about that except maybe try a shorter path if youre in a busy area