Southern Minnesota Station Drops Classic Hits for Conservative Talk

With the election weeks away, a station in the Owatonna area has dropped Classic Hits for Conservative Talk.

KFOW/1170 and K292GU/106.3 (Waseca) are now “FOX News Radio.” The lineup includes Brian Kilmeade, Ben Shapiro, and Dave Ramsey, as well as the Linder Farm Network’s half-hour show at 12:30 and AgriTalk After the Bell at 2.

KFOW, owned by the Linder and Ketelsen families’ Main Street Broadcasting, is operated alongside “KRUE Country 92.1” (Waseca) and Adult Contemporary-formatted KOWZ/100.9 (Blooming Prairie).

Monday morning’s format launch came after five days of running a loop of “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” though the station continued to run newscasts, farm updates, and sports broadcasts during that time. The “Kangaroo” stunt has been regularly used by the Linder/Ketelsen group for format changes in recent years.

The previous Classic Hits format, called “The Train,” had launched when 106.3 signed on in 2016, replacing an Oldies format that had previously aired on 1170 since 2012.

KFOW’s 2.5kW daytime signal covers much of south-central Minnesota, including Faribault, Owatonna, and Waseca, but it must drop to 1kW during critical hours (two hours after sunrise and before sunset) and just 5 Watts at night. K292GU uses 250 Watts from a site between Waseca and Owatonna.