Kenwood TH D72 Digipeater Configuration

Configuring the digipeater on the Kenwood TH-D72

I jumped on a great find at the last Ham Fest I went to. After my surprise of there being two of the hard to find Kenwood TH-D74s at the ham fest, I was surprised yet again to see that someone was selling a Kenwood TH-D72. So I picked that up as soon as I saw it and completed my collection of Kenwood handhelds with built-in TNCs. You may be wondering what I needed a TH-D72 when I already have the TH-D74. Well, this radio has two key features I’m looking for that the D74 doesn’t have - full duplex for satelite work and a built-in digipeater.

As soon as I got it home, I wanted to test out the digipeater function of the radio. To my surprise, there were no YouTube videos on how to do this even though the radio is almost 14 years old now. Some of the websites I followed instructions for didn’t seem to work for me either. So I’ve decided to make a YouTube video and this post to accompany it now that I’ve figured out how to get it working.

Configuring APRS settings

Generally, when I buy a used radio, I do a full reset on it, so for this tutorial I’m starting off with a freshly reset radio. The first thing we’ll need to do is set up the radio for APRS usage by setting the callsign and SSID.

Setting Callsign

To reach the callsign menu hit the following buttons: MENU- 3 -0 -0

It will have NOCALL prefilled in. Delete that by hitting the A/B button which is also the CLR button

Now use the keypad to enter in your callsign then hit ENT to input a dash and then enter in a number from 1 to 15 for your SSID. Next, hit the right side of the round D-PAD button (OK) until it saves.

Configuring the Digipeater

With our APRS settings configured, we’re ready to configure the digipeater by taking the following steps:

Turn on Digipeat

Hit MENU -3 and use the knob to scroll to the Digipeat menu then hit OK twice and use the knob to change this setting to ON and hit OK and then ESC

Turn on UIdigipeat and set Alias

Now scroll to the UIdigipeat menu and hit OK. Hit OK again to enter into the UIdigi setting and set this to ON and hit OK. Scroll down to the Aliases option and hit OK. This is where you set the desired Digipath in the new WIDEn-N format. If you don’t understand, the WIDEn-N format, we will cover that in-depth in another post/video. For our example here, we will use the standard fill-in digitpeater path and enter in WIDE1-1 in the Aliases field (hit ENT twice to get a dash). Once entered, hit OK twice to save and then ESC.

Turn on UItrace and set Alias

This is the final menu to make changes to.

Scroll to the UItrace menu and hit OK. Now hit OK again, set this to ON and then hit OK. Scroll down to Alias and hit OK. If you used the WIDEn-N format, just put WIDE here without the numbers and hit OK twice to save.