WVOY was one of the first all-contemporary-hit-music radio stations in northern Michigan and featured Bill Vogel ("The Captain," formerly of Detroit's WDRQ), John Yaroch, Rick Durkin, and other major-market-quality talent.

Despite WVOY's limited signal, the station became extremely popular and gave northern Michigan listeners a taste of the "big city" radio sound.

After many years of expensive and time-consuming legal wrangling over a hotly contested 100 kW FM license (mostly with religious broadcast proponent Roland Cilke), the station's owners, Tim Ives and Elmo Franklin, sold an interest to former WVOY salesperson and air talent Tim Moore, who had worked with TM Programming Broadcast consultants in the interim since his departure from WVOY in the mid-1970s.

The call letters Moore chose were WKHQ, named after a legendary Spokane, Washington radio and TV combo, KHQ.

In its early years, WKHQ was known as "The Rhythm of the Northwest" (referring, of course, to northwestern Michigan), and its TM "Stereo Rock" jingles used that slogan.

He owned a successful voice-over business, where he produced network spots for CBS and was the announcer for the FOX sketch comedy show Mad TV.

Other personalities in the 1980s: Rob Hazelton, Jim Owen, Chet Jessick, Mark Cage, Mike Sommers and Christopher Knight.In KHQ's first Arbitron Ratings sweep, it was number one across the board and never looked back until Moore and partner Ernie Winn sold the station in 1990.

The departure of the Captain would be the start of many defections by high-profile personalities, including "Storm" Kennedy, Keith Michaels, Lisa Knight, and Ron Pritchard, who programmed the station for most of the late 1990s through the mid-2000s.

Today, WKHQ is still Northern Michigan's #1 rated CHR station [1] Current voice over talent is Chad Erickson, who replaced Randy Cox in April 2019.