101.5 Hank FM has broadcast from the same Salt Lake City frequency since 2000, but it took three call signs, two full format changes and twenty-three years before the station landed on the name it uses today.
Three Names in Three Years
The station signed on 28 June 2000 as KPKK, branded "The Peak," before a brief switch to KKIK in 2003 that lasted barely a day. Later that same year it settled into KEGA, becoming "101.5 The Eagle," a branding it held for two decades, according to the station's call sign history. Two decades under one name is a long run by commercial radio standards, which makes what happened next in 2023 more of a genuine reinvention than a rebrand.
A Format Flip Built on Garth Brooks
On 10 November 2023 the station briefly shifted into Christmas country programming, then used that seasonal bridge to relaunch on 26 December 2023 as "101.5 Hank FM," adopting a new call sign, KNAH, built directly from the new branding. The first song played under the new format was Garth Brooks' "The Thunder Rolls," a deliberate needle-drop for a station betting its future on classic and contemporary country rather than the rock-leaning Eagle format it had carried for twenty years.
Named for the Man Who Basically Invented the Genre
Hank FM isn't a name unique to Salt Lake City. It's a national branding format created by Howard Kroeger, the same programmer behind Bob FM, and operated across roughly 18 stations in the US and Canada, according to Wikipedia's overview of the format. The name nods to Hank Williams, whose influence on country music in the late 1940s and early 1950s helped define much of what the genre still sounds like today, and whose son and grandson carried the family name into later generations of country stardom. Hank FM stations lean on unusually deep playlists, often exceeding 1,000 songs, wider than the sub-500-song rotations typical of traditional country radio.
A Signal Built for Utah's Terrain
The station broadcasts from a transmitter atop Humpy Peak, roughly 50 miles east of Salt Lake City, with booster stations filling in coverage across a metro area shaped as much by mountains as by distance. Utah's terrain makes single-tower coverage difficult almost everywhere outside the valley floor, and Hank FM's booster network is a direct answer to that geography rather than an incidental technical detail.
Utah's Real Country, Two Decades in the Making
101.5 Hank FM markets itself as "Utah's Real Country," a slogan that undersells how long it took the station to get there. Two decades as a rock-format Eagle, a one-day call sign nobody remembers, and a Christmas bridge into a full reinvention, all of it leading to a station finally settled on the genre and the name it was always circling.