so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now and the tracking side works fine, i can see my position on aprs.fi updating every couple minutes which is great. but whenever i try to send a message through the network to another station it just... doesnt work. like i can see the message leaves my TNC (its a Mobilinkd connected to an FT-65) but the other station never receives it and i never get an ack back.

ive tried messaging a few different stations that i know are active, even tried the messaging test bots and nothing comes back. my path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i figured was pretty standard. is there something different about how message routing works vs just beacon packets? i feel like im missing something obvious here

yeah messaging in APRS is a bit different from just beaconing, the path stuff matters a lot more. one thing to check — are you connecting through an igate that has two-way capability? a lot of igates are receive-only, meaning they'll pull your position off RF and push it to the internet but they wont pass messages back down to RF from APRS-IS. you need a two-way or tx-igate near you for that return path to work.

go to aprs.fi and search for igates in your area, the ones with a little different icon or you can dig into the raw data to see if they're tx enabled. if theres no two-way igate within range of the station youre trying to reach thats probably your problem right there. the tracking working fine makes sense because thats just RF -> internet, one direction is easy.

also worth double checking your SSID situation. if youre sending messages they have to be addressed exactly right, like if the other guy is running -9 as his mobile ssid and you're sending to just his callsign without it the message just kind of floats off into nowhere. APRS messaging is weirdly picky about that stuff compared to just position beacons which are more forgiving.