so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now and the position beaconing works fine, i can see myself on aprs.fi moving around no problem. but i cant for the life of me get two-way messaging to work. im using a TM-D710G with the built in TNC and everything looks configured right to me. tried messaging a buddy who runs Dire Wolf on his laptop and he says he can see my position packets but the messages just never arrive at his end.

i checked the path settings and im using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. message ack packets are showing up in the log on my end so it seems like its at least trying. not sure if this is a digipeater issue in my area or something wrong with my config. anyone dealt with this before? its kind of annoying because i wanted to use this for some local ARES stuff and reliable messaging would be pretty important for that.

the D710 has been a bit finicky with messaging in my experience. one thing to check is whether your MYCALL is set correctly including the SSID -- if your beacon is going out as W1ABC-9 but your message destination is set to W1ABC without the SSID those wont match up and messages just get dropped. also worth checking if your buddy has his Dire Wolf callsign config matching what youre actually addressing. sounds dumb but ive chased this exact thing for like an hour before.

also depending on where you are the digipeater coverage for two-way can be spottier than you'd think even if your position packets get through fine. position beacons are shorter and more redundant so they survive bad paths better than a message exchange which needs acks to go both ways.

yeah agreed on the SSID thing, that trips up a lot of people. but also -- is your buddy running an igate that has two-way capability? a lot of igates are receive only and wont inject messages back onto RF. if hes on aprs.fi messaging you and the igate near him is one-way only that message never hits the air. you'd need him to be on RF directly or have a two-way igate nearby. just something to consider before you go digging through the radio config for hours.