so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now, mostly just tracking, and that part works fine — i can see my station on aprs.fi no problem, digipeating seems to be working and my packets are getting out there. but i started trying to use the messaging side of it and i cant for the life of me get messages to actually go through to another station. sent like 4 or 5 messages to a buddy of mine who runs a Kenwood D72 and he never got any of them. he can see my beacon but messages are just gone.

im running a TM-D710G with the internal TNC, path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. im in a pretty decent coverage area, there's an igate like 8 miles from me. wondering if its a path issue or maybe something with how i have the messaging configured on the radio itself. the manual for this thing is not exactly helpful.

anybody dealt with this before? its frustrating because the tracking works perfectly so i feel like im close but missing something obvious

the igate thing is probably your issue, or at least part of it. a lot of igates are receive-only, they'll pull your packets off RF and push them to the APRS-IS network fine, but they wont inject messages back down to RF for delivery. you need a two-way igate near you and near your buddy for the messaging to actually close the loop. you can check on aprs.fi — click on the igate near you and see if it says TX igate or just RX. if its RX only then your messages are going to the internet but theres no way for them to come back down to his radio.

also worth double checking that you have messaging enabled on the D710, theres a setting in the menu somewhere that can be off by default i think. been a while since i messed with mine but i remember being confused by that early on too.

yeah what he said about the igate direction is exactly right. i went through the same thing last year. also make sure your buddy's radio is set to respond to message acks, because without the acknowledgement packet coming back your radio is going to keep retrying and it might look like messages are sending but they never actually confirmed delivery. the D72 should handle that automatically but worth checking his settings too. RF messaging is honestly kind of finicky compared to just watching the map.