so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now with a TM-D710G and its been mostly fine for tracking, i can see myself on the map no problem. but lately when people send me messages through aprs.fi or via their own rigs i just dont get them. the beacon goes out every 5 minutes, digipeater picks it up, i show up on the map with correct position... but the message indicator on the radio never lights up.

what i cant figure out is whether this is a radio config issue or something with how my path is set. im running WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. i did mess around with the TNC settings a few weeks ago trying to fix a different issue and im wondering if i borked something. anyone run into this before? the manual for the D710 is honestly not super helpful for troubleshooting message acknowledgement stuff.

Check your MYCALL setting in the TNC config — sounds obvious but if there's a mismatch between what the radio is beaconing and what's actually set as the station identifier for message routing, messages just go nowhere. Also make sure message acknowledge is enabled, theres a setting burried in the APRS menu on the D710 specifically for that. I think its under APRS MSG or something like that, been a while since i had mine out.

Also worth checking if your squelch is too tight and youre just missing the incoming packets. Messages need to actually be received on frequency to display, the radio doesnt pull them from aprs.fi or anything like that, it only sees what comes over RF. If your local digi is transmitting the messages back and your squelch is clipping the audio you'd see yourself fine on the internet but never receive anything locally.

yeah this got me once too. turned out i had accidentally set the wrong SSID when i was poking around in the menus. was beaconing as W1XYZ-9 but the TNC was listening for messages addressed to W1XYZ-7 or something like that. aprs.fi showed me just fine because it picks up any packet from that callsign but messages were addressed to the wrong suffix so the radio just ignored them. double check all your SSID settings match up end to end.