so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now, mostly just tracking with a Kenwood D72 and it works great, i can see myself on the map, digipeaters are picking me up, all that stuff is fine. but im trying to use the messaging side of things and its hit or miss at best. like ill send a message to another station and sometimes they get it, sometimes they dont, and i never get the ACK back so my radio just keeps retrying until it gives up.

the other station says they see the message eventually on their end but its delayed by like several minutes sometimes. my path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. running about 5 watts. is this a path issue or is messaging just kind of unreliable by design? ive read conflicting stuff about whether you need IGate coverage for messaging to work properly vs just RF path to the other station.

also not sure if this matters but im in a somewhat rural area, theres one digipeater i can hit consistently maybe 30 miles away but i dont know if theres a good IGate nearby

yeah messaging on APRS is honestly kind of frustrating when you first dig into it. the short version is that for message ACKs to work reliably both stations kind of need decent IGate coverage, because a lot of the time the message routing goes RF to IGate, through the APRS-IS network, and then back out through an IGate near the destination. if youre in a rural area with spotty IGate coverage then your messages are going out RF but maybe not getting injected into the IS, and the ACK path back to you is broken.

the WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path is fine, thats pretty much what everyone uses. but if the only digi you can hit is 30 miles out and its not connected to the internet then youre basically RF only island. you can check aprs.fi and look at your station and see which IGates are hearing you, theres a little info section that shows heard-by. if you only see digis and no IGates in that list then thats your problem right there.

messaging was one of those things that took me forever to wrap my head around too. what helped me was actually setting up Direwolf on a pi as a receive-only IGate for a while just to understand what was actually getting through vs what i thought was getting through. you start watching the raw packets come across and it becomes a lot clearer why some stuff makes it and some doesnt.

one thing i'll add — if the other station is also mobile or has an inconsistant beacon rate, sometimes the timing just works against you and the retries end up stepping on each other. not saying thats whats happening but ive seen it. 5 watts should be enough to hit a digi 30 miles out as long as you have a decent antenna, whats on the roof or is this a handheld setup?