so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now, mostly just tracking, and that part works fine — i can see my icon moving around on aprs.fi no problem. but i started messing with the messaging side of things and i cant get it to work reliably at all. sometimes messages go through, sometimes they just sit there with no ack, and i have no idea if its my setup or the network or what.

im running a TM-D710G with a decent antenna on the roof, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. i can hear digipeaters all over the place when i monitor 144.390. the igate in my area is supposedly bidirectional but i honestly have no way to verify that. is there a way to tell if a specific igate is actually passing traffic both ways or just ingesting? feel like im missing something obvious here

yeah the bidirectional igate thing trips a lot of people up. most igates you see listed are rx only, they just pull packets off the air and push them to the APRS-IS. for a message to get back to you over RF the igate has to be configured to gate traffic back down, and a lot of operators either dont have it set up that way or their TNC/software is misconfigured. you can actually check on aprs.fi by clicking on the igate station and looking at what it reports about itself — if it shows as IGate with a two-way icon or mentions TX in the comments thats a decent sign, but honestly the only real test is to send a message to a station you know is on RF and see if the ack comes back.

also worth checking if your radio is set to monitor for the ack properly after transmitting. the D710 should handle that automatically but ive seen weird behavior when the symbol or SSID gets set up wrong and the radio doesnt recognize the incoming ack as being addressed to it.

path might also be part of it depending on your area. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine for most places but if youre in a dense metro with a lot of digis sometimes trimming it back helps, less collisions on the channel. 144.390 gets pretty congested in some markets especially during events or when someone leaves their tracker beaconing every 10 seconds like a maniac lol. not saying thats your issue but worth looking at the raw packets on aprs.fi and seeing how many hops your packets are actually making before they hit an igate.