so ive been messing with APRS messaging for the past few weeks and i cannot figure out why my messages arent getting through to the other station. my beacon packets show up fine on aprs.fi, i can see myself moving around the map when i'm mobile, but the moment i try to send an actual message to another callsign it just sits there with no ACK. tried it with a couple different guys in my area and same result every time.

running a TM-D710G into a decent antenna on the car, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. the other guys are running Direwolf on a Pi or just regular TNC setups. one of them can see my position packets just fine so its not like im not hitting any digis. just the messages specifically that seem to disappear into the void.

anyone run into this before? im wondering if its something with my SSID or the way the radio is formatting the message packets vs the position ones. honestly at this point im just guessing

had almost the exact same thing happen with my D72 a while back. turned out the radio was sending the message packets but with a slightly wrong destination format - i think there was a firmware quirk where messages werent being addressed quite right. worth checking if you can decode your own packets with something like Direwolf locally and just look at the raw output to see what the message frame actually looks like before it even hits a digi.

also, do the other stations have their radios set to receive messages and send ACKs? sounds dumb but i've talked to guys who had message ack disabled or their radio was in a weird mode. the D710 should handle all that automatically but the other end has to be cooperative too. if one of them has Direwolf, have them watch the console when you send a message and see if it even shows up decoded on their end. that'll at least tell you if the packet is making it there or dying in the network somewhere.

your path might actually be part of the problem weirdly enough. messaging is two-way - you need the ACK to make it back to you as well. if the other station is hitting digis that your packets arent making it through on the return path, youll never see the ACK and the radio just keeps retrying. aprs.fi doesnt always show you the full picture of what the network actually looks like in real time, it just shows what made it to an igate.

try watching RF locally with a second receiver and see if you can hear the ACK coming back at all. also what freq are you on, 144.390 i assume? just making sure its not something totally obvious lol