so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now and generally its been working fine for tracking, my position beacons show up on aprs.fi no problem, but the last few weeks any messages i send to other stations just seem to disappear into the void. the other station isnt seeing them and they dont appear in the message log on aprs.fi either.

im running a TM-D710G into a digi i built from a T2-135 board with a raspberry pi running direwolf, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. ive tried sending to a couple different callsigns to rule out the one station being the problem. beacons still work fine which is what makes this weird to me, its specifically the message packets that seem to be getting dropped.

anyone seen this before? wondering if its a direwolf config thing or maybe something upstream with the APRS-IS injection. honestly not even sure where to start debugging this one.

check your direwolf config for the IGATE settings — specifically whether you have igating enabled for messages vs just beacons. there's a setting in direwolf.conf called IGTXVIA or something similar (been a while since i looked at it) that controls whether your igate will pass message packets to RF from APRS-IS. if that's misconfigured messages can just silently not go through while position beacons work totally fine because they follow a different path through the system.

also worth pulling up the raw packet log in direwolf and watching what actually happens when you send a message — does it show the packet being transmitted on RF? does it show acknowledgment coming back? that'll tell you real quick whether its a local TX problem or something further upstream. the message ack system in APRS is actually really useful for debugging this exact kind of thing, if youre not getting acks back at all then the packet probably isnt making it to any digipeater.

had almost this exact same thing happen to me last year. turned out my digi was transmitting the messages fine but there was a timing issue where direwolf was sending the ack packets too fast after receiving and they were colliding with the original retransmit. drove me nuts for like two weeks. probably not your issue but worth looking at the channel activity before you transmit, 144.390 can get pretty busy depending on where you are.