KTGG (1540AM) is aradio station broadcasting fromOkemos, Michigan, with aChristian radioformat of talk andclassical music. It is owned by West Central Michigan Media Ministries and airs programming fromStrong Tower Radio, a network heard on about a dozen radio stations aroundMichigan and one inIllinois.

BecauseAM 1540 is aclear channel frequency reserved forClass A stationsKXEL inWaterloo, Iowa, andZNS-1 inNassau, Bahamas, KTGG is adaytimer station. To avoid interference, it mustsign off at night. By day it broadcasts at 450watts and duringcritical hours (just before sunrise and just after sunset) it is powered at 219 watts.

Until August 2014, KTGG wassimulcast onAM 1510WJKN inJackson, Michigan. WJKN has since been sold to Jackson-Lansing Catholic Radio.

Call signs beginning withK are generally issued only to broadcasting stations west of theMississippi River, so it was unusual that the call letters KTGG were issued for this new station in 1980. Some believe this occurred when someone at theFederal Communications Commission (FCC) mistook "MI" (the postal abbreviation for Michigan) on the station's application as the abbreviation for the western states ofMissouri orMinnesota. KTGG thus became the first new station east of the Mississippi with a "K" call sign in decades. The river was first used as the divider betweenK andW call signs beginning in January 1923.^[2] The original boundary, dating to 1912, had been even farther west, and there had been a few earlier exceptions, includingPittsburgh'sKDKA in 1920, andKYW inPhiladelphia (originally inChicago in 1921), which have retained their heritage non-conforming call letters.

However, KTGG wasn't the last broadcaster with this distinction. A new station inNapeague, New York, was originally dubbed KCBE in 2008 by the FCC, before changing toWEGB in 2009. Since then, several non-commercial religious radio stations east of the Mississippi have gone on the air with K call letters. In most cases it was because theirconstruction permit and call letters were issued for a location west of the Mississippi but the owner relocated the station to east of the Mississippi before it was built. Most of them are owned by theEducational Media Foundation, the Hispanic Family Christian Network or Holy Family Radio.

It’s frequency was previously used by a station calledWMRR, which existed in the 1960s. AM 1510 was acountry music station for over three decades under several call signs, including WJCO, WDJD, and WHBT. The WJKN calls were adopted in 1995 and the format changed to afull-service combination of news, talk andadult contemporary music. In 1998, WJKN phased out music programming and became a predominantly news-talk station. Then, in September 2000, the station wentdark after owner Coltrace Communications (the owner ofWUPS inHoughton Lake) sold the land on which the station's towers were located to a developer. Shortly afterward, Coltrace donated WJKN to its former owner,Spring Arbor University, which returned the station to the air briefly in late 2001 and early 2002 with a simulcast of 106.9WSAE). WJKN was then again dark for several months, and then resurfaced in March 2003 simulcasting KTGG, whose 450-watt signal does not make it far outside of Spring Arbor. In July 2016, KTGG was sold to West Central Michigan Media Ministries for $230,000. KTGG, as of June 2017, is broadcasting a simulicast of Strong Tower Radio 91.9 WGCP-FM Cadillac, Michigan. KTGG remains on after sunset with 185 watts duringcritical hours.

In April 2014, it was announced that Spring Arbor University was selling WJKN 1510 to Jackson-Lansing Catholic Radio (d/b/a Good Shepherd Radio). This was the Catholic broadcaster's second go at getting a radio station in the Jackson area, as they had been in the process of buying the now-defunct WJKQ 88.5 FM when that station's license was revoked by the FCC. The sale was completed in August 2014. WJKN and FM translator 93.3W227BY began airing a Catholic talk format identifying asGood Shepherd Catholic Radio. W227BY was also formerly owned by Spring Arbor University and operated out ofSomerset, Michigan as a translator ofWSAE 106.9 FM.

Effective November 12, 2015, Spring Arbor University consummated the sale of KTGG to West Central Michigan Media Ministries for $230,000. In December 2014, KTGG dropped its previous Christian inspirational music format and became the new home of "The Message," the Christian music and teaching format formerly heard on sister stationWJKN-FM 89.3, which at that time became a simulcast of WSAE's "Home.FM" programming. Like the former inspirational music format, 'The Message" features music programming hosted by Spring Arbor students.

• Michiguide.com - KTGG History^{[permanent dead link]}
• Michiguide.com - WJKN HistoryArchived March 3, 2016, at theWayback Machine
• Facility details for Facility ID 61993 (KTGG) in theFCC Licensing and Management System
• KTGG inNielsen Audio's AM station database
• Facility details for Facility ID 77818 (W284AH) in theFCC Licensing and Management System
• W284AH at FCCdata.org
• Facility details for Facility ID 201492 (W222CU) in theFCC Licensing and Management System
• W222CU at FCCdata.org

• Radio stations in Jackson, Michigan
• Radio stations established in 1985
• Daytime-only radio stations in Michigan
• 1985 establishments in Michigan
• Christian radio stations in Michigan

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