so this has been bugging me for about two weeks now. I can see my station showing up on aprs.fi just fine, beacon is going out every few minutes, position looks right, all that. but whenever I try to send an actual message to another station — like a proper APRS message, not just a beacon — it never seems to arrive. the other guy checks his TH-D74 and nothing. I check my end and it shows sent but no ACK ever comes back.

im using a TNC-Pi hooked up to a 2m radio feeding into Xastir on a raspberry pi. path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. I thought maybe it was an RF issue but like I said the position beacons are clearly making it through because I show up on the map within like 30 seconds. messaging just seems completely broken. has anyone run into this or know what might be causing the disconnect between beacon working and messaging not working

this is actually a pretty common gotcha with Xastir. check your SSID situation — APRS messaging is tied to specific SSIDs and if the destination station's SSID doesn't exactly match what you're addressing, the message just disappears into the void. like if the guy is on W1XYZ-9 and you're sending to W1XYZ without the -9, it technically goes out but nobody's home to ACK it.

also worth checking whether your TNC-Pi is actually in KISS mode properly. sometimes it looks like it's working for beacons because those are one-way but the two-way handshake for messaging exposes weird timing issues. I went through something similar last year, ended up being that my serial port settings were slightly off and Xastir was dropping the incoming ACK frames before they could register. try bumping up the logging verbosity in Xastir and watch what's actually coming back when you send a message.

are you digipeating through a node that actually supports messaging or just position beacons? some of the older igates in certain areas are rx-only and wont forward messages back down from the internet to RF. so your outbound message gets to aprs-is fine but the ACK from the other station or the IS network never makes it back to you over the air. thats been a problem in my area for years, half the digis are ancient and barely maintained.