Amazon / Music & Audio / HODAG COUNTRY 97.3 WHDG
REVIEW
Hodag Country 97.3 puts a Northwoods FM signal on a Fire tablet.
AirKast wraps Rhinelander's hometown country station in a no-frills streaming shell. If you grew up listening to WHDG, this is the easiest way to keep it on in a kitchen 800 miles away.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Hodag Country 97.3 WHDG
AIRKAST, INC.
OUR SCORE
6.8
AMAZON
★ 5.0
PRICE
Free
Rhinelander, Wisconsin is a town of about 7,800 people in the Northwoods, halfway between Wausau and the Michigan border. Its mascot is the Hodag, a 19th-century logging-camp tall tale dressed up as a horned reptile, and its country station is WHDG 97.3 FM — “Hodag Country” — broadcasting at 5,000 watts to a listening area that thins out fast once you cross into the national forest.
This is the app for that station. It is not trying to be more than that. AirKast, the developer, has built versions of this same shell for hundreds of small-market US stations, and the template is honest about what it is: a play button, a stream, a logo, a few tabs of station ephemera, and a way to call the studio request line.
For most Fire tablet owners this is a five-star app that they will never download. For the handful who grew up listening to Hodag Country and now keep a Fire HD on the kitchen counter, it’s exactly the right shape.
The app is a thin coat of paint over an Icecast URL — and for a 5,000-watt small-market station, that's the right amount of paint.
FEATURES
Hodag Country 97.3 WHDG is one of hundreds of small-market US radio apps built by AirKast on the same shared template. Open it on a Fire tablet and you get the WHDG logo, a play button, the current track artist and title when the station's metadata pipeline is behaving, and a small set of tabs underneath: schedule, contests, news, social, contact the studio. The audio stream is a single live feed of the over-the-air signal — no podcast archive, no on-demand replays, no second HD subchannel.
The station itself is the draw. WHDG broadcasts from Rhinelander, Wisconsin, named for the Hodag, the local mythical horned lumber-camp creature that has been the town's mascot since the 1890s. Playlist is mainstream country — current Nashville hits in heavy rotation, classic country in evening blocks, Packers and Brewers talk threaded through the morning show, weather and road conditions tuned for Oneida and Vilas counties.
Background playback works on Fire OS and the lock screen shows the now-playing card with pause and skip-forward controls (the skip is a no-op on a live stream). Chromecast and Bluetooth handoff to an Echo or a car stereo behave correctly.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The stream is stable. That is the entire job of a small-market radio app and AirKast has been doing it long enough that buffering events are rare even on a slow rural connection. The bitrate is modest but the encode is clean, and the station's automation rarely drops dead air between songs.
For Northwoods expats — the people who moved to Madison or Minneapolis or Phoenix and still want the morning show, the high-school football scores, and the Hodag Country Festival promos in July — this app is the single shortest path back to the signal. That's a small audience but a real one.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Discovery and depth are nonexistent. There is no archive of past shows, no on-demand replay of the morning interview you missed, no podcast feed for the station's local segments. Contest entry pages occasionally load to a 404 when a promotion has expired. The "news" tab pulls a generic regional RSS feed rather than anything WHDG-specific.
The template shows its age. Visual design is 2014 mobile-web — flat blue chrome, a band of stock graphics, ad units that intermittently fail to fill and leave a blank rectangle where the banner should be. None of this breaks the audio, but on a 10-inch Fire HD the empty real estate is obvious.
CONCLUSION
Install this if you have a personal reason to listen to WHDG specifically — you live in Oneida County, you used to, or someone you love does. Anyone shopping for a general country-music streaming app should use iHeartRadio or TuneIn instead and search "country" there. For the Hodag faithful, though, this is the app, and it works.