so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now, mostly just position beaconing from the car with a TM-D710G and it works great, i can see myself on aprs.fi no problem. but i decided to try using the messaging function last week and i cant get anything to work consistently. i sent a message to a buddy's HT (he's got a VX-8DR) and it showed up on aprs.fi as delivered but he never got it on the radio itself, and when he replied i got nothing on my end either.

we're both going through the same igate i think, at least we're both hitting W5XYZ-10 based on the heard-by info. is this a simplex messaging thing where the igate has to be two-way capable or am i missing something in my config. i went through the menu on the 710 and the message settings look right to me but honestly that radio has a million menus and i might have screwed something up somewhere.

also kind of a side question — does anyone actually use APRS messaging regularly or is everyone just doing position tracking these days. feels like half the igates out there are receive-only and that kills the two-way stuff

yeah the igate thing is almost certainly your problem. a receive-only igate will pull your position off RF and push it to the APRS-IS just fine, so you show up on aprs.fi no problem, but it cant inject messages back onto RF so your buddy never hears anything. you need a bidirectional igate in range of both of you for the messaging to work end to end over RF.

the way to check is look at the igate's info page on aprs.fi, there should be something indicating if its IGating in both directions. a lot of guys run Direwolf or APRX and just never enable the RF transmit side because they dont want to deal with the PTT setup or licensing the gateway. totally understandable but it does cripple the messaging side of things.

honestly if you want reliable APRS messaging you almost have to use APRS-IS on at least one end, like through an app on your phone connected to the internet. pure RF messaging is kind of hit or miss depending on your local infrastructure.

i use messaging semi-regularly during our county ARES nets, works pretty well once you figure out the infrastructure situation. but yeah what the other guy said is right, two-way igates are rarer than you'd think.

one thing to double check on the 710G — make sure your MYCALL is set correctly with the SSID and that you have the message ack timeout set to something reasonable. i think the default might be kind of short and if the network is even slightly congested the acks dont come back in time and the radio gives up. i had that issue for a while before i figured out what was happening