so ive been running APRS for a few months now, mostly just for tracking when i go out portable, and the position beacons work fine i can see myself on aprs.fi no problem. but whenever i try to send a message to another station — whether theyre on RF or just APRS-IS — i get nothing back, no ack, nothing. its like the messages just disappear.

running a TM-D710A into a comet antenna on the roof, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. the radio is NOT connected to the internet, just pure RF into the local digi network. there are a few igates in range, i can see them on the map. just really confused why my position gets gated but the messages seem to get eaten somewhere along the way.

anybody run into this before or have any idea what im doing wrong

this is actually a pretty common gotcha with APRS messaging when youre RF only. the thing is, your beacon packets go out and any igate hears them and dumps them onto APRS-IS no problem. but for messaging to work both ways, you basically need a two-way igate nearby — meaning one that not only uploads from RF to internet but also gates messages back down from APRS-IS to RF. a lot of igates out there are receive-only, they just suck packets up and push them to the internet but wont inject anything back onto RF. so if the station youre messaging is on APRS-IS side and your local igates are RX-only, your message goes nowhere.

check on aprs.fi what igates are actually hearing you and then look up whether theyre configured as two-way. sometimes you can tell from the igate status packets. if theres no two-way gate in range, you kind of just have to accept that RF-only APRS messaging is hit or miss depending on your local infrastructure. the D710 itself is solid for this stuff, probably not the radio thats the issue.

yeah what the other guy said about two-way igates is spot on. also double check your UNPROTO path on the D710 — theres kind of a buried setting where the message path can be set separately from your beacon path on some firmware versions, i got bit by that once where my beacons were going out fine but messages were using some weird default. its worth going through the APRS menu again just to verify everything is set the same. also are you getting ANY acks at all, even delayed ones? sometimes it works eventually just really slowly depending on how busy the digis are.