Nearly eight months after its launch, Tomball’s local low-power FM station—95.3 KTTF Tomball Texas for Fun—has become a local resource for residents and city officials.

“During the flooding, we were using it constantly and we were getting tons of phone calls,” Marketing Director Mike Baxter said, referring to the spring storms that inundated the region. “We were telling people when the next wave of storms were coming though and things like that. Since then, we’ve used it a lot, [like] during the Ironman [triathlon] to tell people where the streets were blocked.”

The station operates from Tomball Fire Station No. 1 on Rudel Street and has a broadcast radius of about 5-10 miles from the center of the city. Funding for the station is included in the fire department’s emergency management budget.

In July, the city ended a partnership with Backyard Radio in Magnolia that allowed the stations to share music and content. In the ensuing months, Baxter said he and Tomball Fire Chief Randy Parr have worked to accumulate enough music and content to make the station 100 percent local.

“We’d been piggybacking with Backyard [Radio] out of Magnolia, but it was telling people to tune to 103.5 FM instead of [our station],” Baxter said. “So that’s why we got out of it to promote our city and our events.”

Baxter said the station plays a mix of music styles and genres on a loop throughout the day using a collection of CDs uploaded to a computer program. However, the city is still looking to diversify the station’s content.

“It just has a lot of opportunity,” he said. “It’s very eclectic right now, and we’re not just doing Top 40 music. The aspect of news is something that we want to pursue as well.”

In addition to using the radio for local entertainment and emergency alerts, the city has entered a new partnership with Tomball ISD, Lone Star College-Tomball and Concordia Lutheran High School to provide an outlet for students to produce more content and gain experience in broadcasting.

Baxter said the station will be able to broadcast local sporting events as well as band and choir performances. In May, the station livestreamed the graduation ceremonies for Tomball and Tomball Memorial high schools from Texas A&M University.

“The initial focus of this [station]was going to be another tool in our toolbox for emergency management so we could broadcast the happenings going on with floods and tornadoes, major accidents, and things like that,” Parr said.  “And as it evolved, we thought, ‘Well, you can’t put that on there 24 hours a day because we’re just not that busy.’ We thought this would be a great opportunity for some high schoolers and the college to participate.”

Parr said the student-produced content will be managed by a committee of representatives from the city and schools to decide on subject matter and the sound quality of both live and prerecorded content.

“With some of the preliminary work, there was lot of echo, a lot of in and out on the voice,” he said. “But that’s part of the teaching aspects of getting these kids in here to let them know that this is what you need to do to be professional and to sound professional.”