so this has been bugging me for a few days now. I can see my station showing up on aprs.fi just fine, beacon is going out every few minutes, path looks reasonable (WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1), but when I try to send messages through the TNC to another station they just dont seem to arrive. the other guy can see my position but he says he never gets the message packets.

im running a TM-D710G into a Mobilinkd TNC3 on the side port actually no wait, its just the 710 by itself using its built in TNC. been a while since I messed with the settings and honestly I might have something configured wrong in the radio. symbol is set correctly, SSID is -9 since im usually mobile.

has anyone run into this where the beacon works but messaging is just broken? wondering if its a path thing or maybe the 710 has a setting I forgot about

the D710 has a separate setting for message retry count and I think by default it might be set pretty low, or in some firmware versions it kinda just doesnt retry aggressively enough. check your APRS menu and look for the message settings specifically, not just the beacon ones. also double check that your callsign in the radio matches exactly what you think it is including the SSID — ive seen people have the beacon going out as NOCALL or something weird because the radio wasnt fully programmed even though position was transmitting fine somehow.

also worth asking — is the other station using RF or are they connected via IGate? if hes on RF only and theres no digipeater between you two that can handle message traffic specifically, sometimes they just get lost. messaging in APRS is more two-way dependent than beaconing is.

I had almost the exact same thing happen last spring. turned out my radio had the wrong MY CALLSIGN set — position beacons were going out fine because I had set the GPS feed up separately but the message origination was using whatever default was in the message config. felt dumb when I figured it out tbh. worth checking every callsign field in that radio individually, the 710 has like three different places it stores your call depending on what mode youre in.