so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and i got my beacon working fine, shows up on aprs.fi with the right symbol and everything, position looks correct. but whenever i try to send a message through the TM-D710 to another station i never get an ack back and the other guy says he never receives anything. tried a few different people in the area so its not just one station being down or whatever.

my path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard for this area. running into a digipeater about 4 miles away that i can see on the map. is there something different about how messages get routed vs just the beacon packets? i feel like i must be missing something obvious here because the beacon clearly goes through fine.

also not sure if relevant but im connected to an internet gateway too through the radio, not just doing RF only if that matters at all

yeah messages in APRS are a bit different than beacons, you actually need to make sure the destination station is reachable and that you're getting their acks back. one thing to check is whether the station youre trying to message is RF-reachable or if theyre only showing up on aprs.fi because they're connected via APRS-IS on the internet side. if theyre igate-only you might need to make sure there's a two-way capable igate in your area that can pass the message back down to RF.

also the D710 has some quirks with message retry settings, i think the default retry count is pretty low. dig into the menu and bump up the retries, i think mine is set to like 8 or 10. and double check that the callsign youre addressing the message to matches exactly including any SSID, even a missing -9 or whatever will make it fail silently

had the exact same problem when i first set mine up. turned out the igate near me was receive-only, couldnt inject back onto RF at all. you can check on aprs.fi by clicking on the igate and seeing if it says bidirectional or just receive. once i found a proper two way gate things started working a lot better for messages. beacons dont need that because they just go up and get heard, but messages need the whole path to work both ways.