Like I said, it must be something simple $HBAUD 1200 --> 19200. I was lead to believe that HBAUD was the over-the-air baud, but that really makes no sense in retrospect because the TNC takes care of that.
On the air and downloading my group.io emailed digests.
I'm sure there will need to be some tweaking of the various ax25 parameters, but the basics are now working.