so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now. I can see my station showing up on aprs.fi just fine, position updates coming through every few minutes, path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. but whenever i try to send a message through APRS — either from the radio itself or from APRSdroid on my phone via bluetooth to the TNC — the messages just seem to disappear. recipient never gets them and i never see them show up in the raw packets on aprs.fi either.

I'm running a TM-D710G into a Mobilinkd TNC3 when i'm using the phone, and just using the built-in TNC mode when i'm on the radio directly. tried both. same problem. my digipeater path looks correct to me but honestly i might be missing something obvious. the weird part is I received a message from another station last month no problem, so the receive side at least seems to work.

anyone dealt with this before? feels like a TX issue somewhere but the beacon packets go out fine so i dont get it

Check your SSID situation first — if you're sending from APRSdroid and your radio is set to a different SSID they're essentially two separate stations as far as the network is concerned. messages sent to one won't show up on the other. also make sure the radio's TNC isn't fighting with the Mobilinkd at the same time, if both are active and keying PTT you'll get garbage packets. the D710 can be fussy about that.

Also worth pulling the raw feed for your callsign on findu.com or aprs.fi and filtering for message packets specifically. sometimes they're going out but getting dropped somewhere in the IS feed or the message server just isnt routing them right. APRS messaging over RF has always been kinda hit or miss depending on how well your local digis handle the message ack cycle.

yeah the ack thing is the killer. APRS messages need a round trip — your station sends the message, the destination has to send back an ack packet, and if that ack never makes it back to you your radio just keeps retrying and eventually gives up. so it could actually be getting through but the ack is whats failing. id try messaging a known-active igate station or someplace like a weather node that auto-acks and see if that completes. at least then you can narrow down if its outbound or the whole two-way handshake thats broken