so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now mostly just tracking, got my VX-8GR set up with the built in TNC and its been working fine for position beaconing. i can see myself on aprs.fi no problem, moving around the map when im mobile, all good there.

the issue is messaging. i tried sending a message to another local ham yesterday, he could see my beacon fine but my messages just never showed up on his end. and ive gotten zero messages from anyone even when people said they were sending to me. tried adjusting my SSID thinking maybe thats the issue but that didnt seem to matter. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for around here right? our local igate is maybe 8 miles away and i hit it consistently based on the packets showing on the site.

is there something specific about how message routing works vs just beacon packets? feels like they should work the same way but clearly something is different. running RF only, no APRS-IS connection on my end.

yeah messaging in APRS is a whole different animal compared to just beaconing. the thing most people dont realize is that for a message to actually get delivered, the receiving station has to be heard by the igate too, not just you. the igate needs to see both sides basically. if your buddy is RF only and the igate cant hear him directly, or if hes not connected to APRS-IS through a client like aprsdroid or something, the message just kind of dies in the network.

also check whether your igate is actually bidirectional. a lot of igates are receive-only, meaning they push stuff to APRS-IS but they dont gate messages back down to RF. you need a two-way igate for that and they're honestly not as common as youd think. you can check on aprs.fi by looking at the igate station page and it should show whether its rx-only or two-way. thats probably your issue right there.

had the exact same problem last winter. drove me nuts for like two weeks. turns out the igate I was hitting was rx-only the whole time, so my beacons got to APRS-IS fine but nothing was ever coming back down to me on RF. once i found a two-way igate a bit further out and adjusted my path slightly it started working. not perfectly but way better than before. also make sure message retry is enabled on the radio, the VX-8 should do automatic retries but worth double checking in the menu somewhere around the APRS message settings i think its like 3 retries by default.