Radio Ton - Aktuelle Hits streams a current top 40 rotation of German and international chart music, the up-to-the-minute hits webradio spun off from Radio Ton, Baden-Württemberg's largest local broadcasting network. The main station has served the Heilbronn-Franken and Ostwürttemberg regions since the late 1980s, and its history is tied closely to a city whose identity was built on something older than radio: wine.
A local song for the first broadcast
Radio Ton began under the name Radio Regional in Heilbronn, signing on for the first time on November 25, 1987, with the song "Laguna d'amor" by the Kraichgau band Fernando Express as its opening track, according to a history of the station on German Wikipedia. The station started with a team of 25 employees. In 1994, it merged with Radio T.O.N., a Bad Mergentheim broadcaster whose name stood for its coverage area of Tauber, Odenwald, and Neckar, becoming Radio Ton Regional. Further growth followed in 2003, when the station won a license for the Ostwürttemberg region and acquired Neckar-Alb-Radio in Reutlingen, building the network into what is now described as Baden-Württemberg's largest local radio operation, running roughly 80 staff across studios in Heilbronn and Aalen.
Broadcasting from Württemberg's oldest wine city
Heilbronn has cultivated wine for more than 1,250 years, making it the oldest wine city in Württemberg, and it still sits at the center of the Württemberg Wine Route with roughly 500 hectares of vineyard surrounding the city. Heilbronn first appears in written records in the year 741, under the name Villa Helibrunna, and gained status as a free imperial city in 1371, cementing centuries of independence built on its position as a Neckar River trading hub. That wine-growing identity, warm river-valley terrain wrapped in vineyards, has outlasted every media format Radio Ton has run through since 1987.
A hits stream built for the moment, not the archive
Aktuelle Hits strips away Radio Ton's regional news programming and local call-in features to focus purely on current chart music, a straightforward companion stream for listeners who want the network's pop instincts without its local-news identity. It represents the newest layer of a station that has spent nearly four decades adding regions, mergers, and now genre-specific webradio spinoffs onto a broadcast history that started with one homegrown pop song in a Neckar Valley wine town.