so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now. i can see my station showing up on aprs.fi just fine, my beacon is going out every few minutes and the path looks reasonable (WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1) but whenever i try to send a message to another station i get nothing. no ack, message just sits there with the retry counter going up and eventually gives up.

the other station is definitely online, i can see their beacon on the map too. tried messaging a couple different callsigns and same deal. im running a TM-D710G into a mag mount on the roof and using the built in TNC, 50w output. the receive side seems fine because i can see other peoples packets decoding in the monitor screen.

is this a path issue or something with how the radio is set up for messaging specifically? i feel like ive read that messaging has different requirements than just beaconing but i cant find where i read that now

the beacon going out doesnt necessarily mean your messages are getting through the same way. one thing to check is whether the station youre trying to message is actually IGate-reachable or if theyre RF-only. if they're not near a two-way IGate it can get weird where you see them on aprs.fi (because their packets got uploaded) but your messages cant actually reach them via the internet path and you dont have RF path to them directly either.

also double check your MYCALL is set correctly with the SSID and everything, ive seen the D710 do weird things when the callsign entry is slightly off. and yeah messaging does kinda depend more on a solid two-way path than beaconing does, a digipeater will forward your beacon but for message acks you need the whole chain to work in both directions. if youre going through an IGate the gate has to be two-way capable and actually have RF coverage to the destination if theyre not on the internet side.

had basically the exact same problem last year, turned out my path was fine but the regional IGate near me was one-way only -- it was gateing RF to internet but not internet to RF so acks were just dying. checked on aprs.fi under the IGate info and sure enough it showed no RF output. found a different IGate about 30 miles away that was two-way and after i repositioned a little (just drove to higher ground lol) it started working. not saying thats your issue but worth looking at what IGates are hearing you and whether theyre actually two-way