so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now. my position beacons are showing up fine on aprs.fi, path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 and i can see my station getting digipeated by a couple local stations so that part is working. but when i try to send an APRS message, either to another station or to one of the message gateways, nothing gets through. the other station never shows it received anything and i never get an ack back.

im using a kenwood TM-D710G and a home built TNC situation... wait no actually its the built in TNC on the radio. i have it hooked into a magmount on the truck right now so maybe that's part of it but the beacon gets out fine so i dont think its RF. running 50w into a decent enough antenna for mobile.

anyone dealt with this before? is there some setting on the D710 for messages specifically that im missing? i went through the menu like three times and couldn't find anything obvious.

the D710 has a quirk with message acks where if your callsign isnt entered exactly right in the MY CALLSIGN menu - including the SSID - messages will go out but acks come back addressed to something slightly different and the radio just ignores them. check that your SSID in the radio matches whatever you're beaconing as. if you're sending as W1ABC-9 the radio needs to have W1ABC-9 set, not just W1ABC.

also worth checking if the receiving station is actually APRS-capable and has messaging enabled. a lot of trackers only do position reporting and will never respond to a message even if they get it. if you're trying to message an SMSGTE or APRSIS gateway type object that should work though, assuming the path is getting there.

yeah what he said about the SSID is probably it, caught me out once too. but also -- are you actually in range of an igate that does bidirectional traffic? like you can beacon all day because digipeaters just repeat everything, but messages need an igate that's actually listening AND can inject traffic back into RF for the ack to get back to you. a lot of igates are receive-only. check aprs.fi and look at which igates are hearing you, then look up whether those igates are listed as two-way. if they're all rx-only you'll never get acks no matter what.