so ive been running APRS for a few months now with a TM-D710G and it tracks just fine, i can see my callsign moving around on aprs.fi when im mobile and everything looks good there. the problem is when i try to send messages through the rig they just seem to disappear. like i'll type out a message to another station who i can see is active on the map, hit send, and the rig shows it queuing up and retrying but never gets an ACK back and eventually just gives up.

i thought maybe it was a path issue so i changed from WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 to just WIDE2-2 but same deal. the other station told me they never see my messages come through on their end either. position packets work fine though which is what makes this weird to me. running 50w into a mag mount on the roof, 144.390 obviously, digipeater coverage in my area seems decent based on what i can see hitting the igate near me.

anybody dealt with this before or have any idea what im doing wrong here

this is actually a pretty common gotcha with the D710. the message path can be configured separately from your beacon path in some setups and a lot of people dont realize it. worth going into the APRS menu and double checking that your message retry settings are actually configured and not just sitting at defaults. also are you sure the igate near you is two-way? a lot of igates are receive only, they'll forward your position to the internet fine but they wont inject messages back into RF for stations that are only reachable that way. if the guy youre trying to reach is also dependent on an igate to get messages then both igates need to be two-way and they need to be passing APRS-IS traffic in both directions, which honestly a surprising number arent set up to do properly. check aprs.fi for the igate near you, click on it, and see if it says RF-to-IS only or bidirectional.

yeah what the other guy said about two-way igates is spot on. i ran into this exact thing last year trying to message someone across town. we could both see each other on the map all day but messages just vanished. turned out neither of us had a two way igate close enough so the messages were making it to APRS-IS fine but never getting injected back to RF on the other end. kind of a fundemental limitation of how the whole system works that doesnt get explained well when youre first getting into it. once we both happened to be close to a known two-way igate it worked immediately. theres a filter on aprs.fi somewhere that lets you see igate capability i think, been a while since i looked.