so this has been bugging me for a while now. my position beacons are showing up fine on aprs.fi, i can watch myself move around on the map which is cool, but when i try to send actual messages through the network they just... dont arrive. or at least nobody confirms them. im using a TM-D710G connected to a Raspberry Pi running direwolf as a software TNC, the radio itself has built in APRS but i wanted to try the direwolf setup for more flexibility.

the weird thing is the path im using is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be pretty standard, and like i said beacons are digipeated fine. i tried messaging another local ham who confirmed he wasnt getting anything from me. he can message me and i see those come through on the pi, just cant seem to transmit messages successfully. wondering if its something with how direwolf is handling the message packet format vs what the network expects, or maybe a timing issue with my TX delay settings. anyone run into this?

had almost the exact same issue a while back, turned out my TX delay was way too short and the digipeaters were basically missing the start of my packets. with direwolf the TXDELAY setting in the config needs to account for your radio's PTT response time, and the D710 can be a little slow on that depending on how you have PTT wired up. i was running something like 30ms and bumped it to 50 and suddenly everything started working. also worth double checking that direwolf is actually getting ack packets back and processing them, you can crank up the log verbosity and watch what's happening in real time, it'll show you if its getting no acks or if the messages are queuing up and retrying.

the other thing i'd look at is whether direwolf is set to connected mode or UI frames for messaging, APRS messages are supposed to be UI frames and if something is misconfigured there the format will be off enough that other stations wont parse them right even if they receive the RF fine.

is your ssid set up right? i know it sounds dumb but i spent like two weeks troubleshooting something similar and it turned out my mobile station and home station were both using the same callsign-ssid and the network was getting confused about which one to route acks to. also what igate are you hitting? some older igates are kinda flaky about passing messages back to RF, they'll ingest your position just fine but message handling is a different thing. you can check on aprs.fi under your callsign and look at the raw packets tab to see what's actually hitting the internet side, might give you a clue if the packets are malformed or something