so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now. i've got a kenwood TM-D710G hooked up and my position beacons are showing up fine on aprs.fi, digipeater is picking me up and everything looks normal from that end. but when i try to send messages to another station — my buddy about 30 miles away — he never gets them. and same thing in reverse, he can send to me and i dont see anything coming in on the radio display.

we're both showing up on the network so it's not like we're deaf to the digi. i checked the path settings and im using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for our area. the rig is set to the standard 144.390 and the TNC is definitely active because the beacons go out. just the messaging part that seems completely dead. anybody dealt with this before or have an idea what im missing here

Had something similar on my D72 a while back. Check whether the messaging is actually enabled on the radio — on the 710 there's a separate toggle for APRS messaging vs just beacon mode, it's easy to have one on and the other off. Also worth checking if your buddy's station is set up to ACK messages properly, because without the acknowledgment packet coming back the radio might just be silently dropping them. The message queue on those Kenwoods can also fill up and stop accepting new ones if you've got a bunch of unacked messages piled up in there, which happens more than people realize.

aprs.fi showing your position doesnt really tell you much about the message path tbh. position packets and message packets can take totally different routes through the network depending on whats around you. i'd fire up aprsdroid or something on your phone connected to an APRS-IS server and see if the messages are actually hitting the internet backbone at all. if they're not getting to IS then theyre dying somewhere in the RF chain and its probably a path issue or the local digi doesnt have messaging enabled. some older digis are configured to only pass certain packet types and message packets occasionally get dropped, seen it happen in a few areas where the digi hasnt been touched in years