so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now, mostly just tracking my truck when im out doing SOTA activations so my wife can see where i am. using a TM-D710G connected to aprs.fi and it works great for that. but lately ive been messing with the path settings and i honestly dont fully understand what im doing.

right now im set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i think is the standard recommendation but i read somewhere that if youre in a dense area you should maybe drop it to just WIDE1-1 to avoid congesting the network. im in a mid-size city, not super rural but not downtown manhattan either. theres probably 4 or 5 digipeaters within range of me on a good day.

also completely separate question but does anyone actually use the messaging feature on APRS? like the actual two-way text messaging? ive played with it a little but it feels clunky and im not sure if people on the other end even see the messages in real time or if its just stored somewhere.

yeah WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine for most situations and its definitely the baseline most people recommend. the reason you'd scale back is if you're like right next to a fill-in digi that's already hearing everyone — in that case WIDE1-1 alone might be plenty to get you into the main network. with 4-5 digis in range you're probably okay where you are but you could experiment, just watch your heard stats on aprs.fi and see how many hops your packets are actually taking.

on the messaging thing — yes people do use it but you're right that it can feel laggy. it works best when both stations are actively digipeated and have something like APRSdroid or a D7/D710 style rig that shows incoming messages. ive had decent luck messaging into a net when everyone was set up and paying attention but if someones just running a tracker with no display they'll never see it. its more useful than most people give it credit for honestly, just takes coordination.

the messaging thing caught me off guard when i first tried it too. sent a message to a buddy and it just kind of... sat there. turns out his tracker was a DIY thing running KISS mode to a raspberry pi and nobody had configured the messaging side at all. so yeah, depends totally on what the other person is running.

one thing worth knowing is that APRS messages do have an ACK system built in so if the other station is actually capable of receiving and acking you'll get a confirmation. if you never get an ACK after a few retries its pretty safe to assume they either didnt get it or their setup cant respond. i use APRSdroid on my phone sometimes as a backup and that works pretty reliably for messaging when im near a good igate.