I have made my first and only channel and I wanted to test out RTL. I was able to send funds to my lightning wallet from there but when I created a receive invoice I couldn`t receive and the transaction always failed. Sorry if this is a silly questions 
It might have failed to find a routing path. I run a very simple node, but I try to connect to at least three large nodes so that a routing path can usually be found. I have less failed transactions this way
I see. I will have to put quite a few sats into each new channel I open, right?
Funding the channel will produce outbound liquidity. To be able to receive sats you need to send some of the funds out of the new channel you created. You can send them to yourself though on a wallet or channel of your choice
I know I must be missing something really basic here. I don`t understand why my invoice always fails. It seems I have around 5000 in liquidity.
My advice would be to give it a little more breathing room. To do this, I would send a LN transaction from RTL to an invoice produced from a LN wallet on my phone. Don’t be shy with the # of sats. If you have ~1M sats in your RTL, then I would send 500k to your phone wallet. Doing that would make your LN channel approximately balanced to where you should then be able to either send or receive 400k+ sats on your next Tx.
Keeping your channel(s) liquidity balanced is important to ensure future transactions can happen without problems.
You almost certainly need inbound liquidity. It might be worth reading through this article to understand how lightning channels work.
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