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.
