so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now, mostly just tracker stuff with my D710 in the truck, and it works great for that. i can see myself moving around on aprs.fi no problem. but lately ive been trying to actually use the messaging side of it and i cant get messages to go through reliably at all. sometimes they get there, sometimes they just disappear into the void.

my setup is the D710 feeding into the radio through the built in TNC, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. the digi here in town is pretty active, i can see packets from it constantly on RF. but when i send a message to another station i either get an ack back eventually or nothing, and the other guy says he never sees it on his end. it seems random.

is this a path issue or is something else going on? i tried tightening the path to just WIDE1-1 and that didn't seem to change anything. honestly not sure if its a problem on my end or just the network being the network.

APRS messaging is honestly kind of unreliable by design, like the whole system is built around unconnected packets so theres no guaranteed delivery except for that ack handshake. but if youre not getting acks at all that does point to something more specific.

few things id check — first, is the other station actually on RF or are they only showing up via an igate? because if theyre IGated in from the internet their radio might not be on or they might not be in a position to receive. the message would go out over RF from you, get picked up by an igate, forwarded to the APRS-IS, and then it needs another igate near them to gate it back down to RF, and a lot of igates are receive-only so that last step never happens.

also worth checking if your igate supports message gating in both directions. some of them are set up as receive only which means your packets get to the internet fine but nothing comes back down to RF. the D710 setup sounds fine honestly, path is reasonable, i wouldnt go wider than that in a decent coverage area.

yeah what he said about receive-only igates is a big one, tripped me up for weeks when i first started messing with messaging. the tracker part just works because you only need one direction but messaging needs both sides to line up which almost never happens perfectly lol

also are you sending the messages from the radio keypad or through a connected device? i had weird behavior on mine once where the TNC was basically queueing things wrong and some messages were never actually hitting the air, they just looked like they were sent on the display. connected a laptop with APRSIS32 and could actually see what was and wasnt going out. might be worth monitoring your own RF output just to confirm the packets are actually transmitting when you think they are