so ive been running APRS for a few months now and overall its working fine, my position beacons are hitting the network no problem, i can see myself on aprs.fi and the path looks good. but whenever i try to send a message to another station — either via the TNC or through APRS-IS — it just kind of disappears. the other person never gets it and i never get an ack back.

im using a TM-D710G with the internal TNC, path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. ive checked that messaging is enabled in the menu but honestly there are like 400 menu items on that radio and i might have something wrong. the messages show as sent on the radio display but thats it. doesnt matter if im trying to reach someone RF-only or someone who should be reachable through the APRS-IS gateway nearby.

anyone run into this? im pretty confident the TX is working since beacons get out, so i dunno if its a configuration thing or something with how messages route differently than position packets. maybe the igate near me is rx only and not passing messages back to RF? that would explain some of it but not the ones going to IS-connected stations

yeah the rx-only igate thing is almost certainly your problem, or at least part of it. a lot of igates especially the ones run by people who set it up once and forgot about it are receive only — they'll pass packets from RF to IS all day long but they won't do the reverse. for a message to get back to you over RF you need a two-way igate in range and there just arent that many of them. you can check on aprs.fi, click on the igate station near you and see if it says RF-IS or bidirectional. if its one-way thats your wall right there.

the D710 messaging config is probably fine honestly, that radio is pretty solid for APRS out of the box. i would double check that you have the correct SSID on the destination callsign though, people mess that up more than you'd think and the message just goes nowhere if the SSID is wrong.

had almost the exact same issue last year. turned out my nearest igate was rx-only and the next closest two-way gate was just barely out of range for reliable decode on the return path. ended up setting up my own two-way igate with a pi and direwolf which honestly wasnt that hard and now i can actually use messaging. aprx works too if you want something a bit lighter weight on the pi.