so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now. i can see my station showing up on aprs.fi just fine, my beacon is going out every few minutes and the position is updating correctly. but whenever i try to send a message through APRS — either to another station or just to EMAIL or SMSGTE — nothing seems to get through. the other station says they never received it and the email gateway never responds.

im running a TM-D710G with a decent antenna on the roof, using 144.390 obviously. digipeater path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1. i dont think its an RF issue because my position packets are clearly getting picked up by at least two or three igates in range. but messages are a different story apparently.

is there something specific about how message packets are handled differently than position beacons? i feel like im missing something obvious here. been licensed a few years but only recently started messing with APRS beyond just passive tracking.

yeah messages are tricky because its not like a one-way beacon — the system actually needs an ACK to come back to you and your radio has to hear it. so even if your position is getting out fine, if the igate nearest you is receive-only and not connected to the APRS-IS in a way that routes message ACKs back out to RF, you'll just sit there retrying forever. check if there's a two-way igate in your area on aprs.fi — look for the little icon difference or just look at what's been gating traffic both directions. also SMSGTE specifically can be finicky, ive had better luck with WLNK-1 for email stuff. and double check your callsign-SSID is set correctly in the radio because if thats off the ACK wont find you even if everything else works.

the two-way igate thing is almost certainly your problem. most igates out there are rx only, they just dump packets to the internet but dont gate anything back to RF. so your message goes up, maybe even reaches the destination through APRS-IS, but the ACK never makes it back to your radio and so the D710 just keeps resending thinking it failed. honestly a lot of areas have pretty sparse two-way igate coverage. you might want to look at setting up your own if you have an always-on machine at home, direwolf with the right config isnt that complicated and then you solve your own problem and help the local network.