History
The station's construction permit was first issued to original station owner, local businessman Bill Evans on November 22, 1968. [4] Two years later, the station signed on the air at 106.3 MHz on November 24, 1969, [5] at 10 a.m. Eastern time. [4] The station was the first FM station to broadcast from Elizabethtown. Evans decided to give the station the nickname "Quicksie", after a Georgia-based radio station with that nickname that he heard while attending Elkins Radio School. The call letters were chosen by Evans himself per a vow that if he ever owned a station, he'd make sure that the call letters matched the "Quicksie" branding. [6] The station began operating with an Adult contemporary format, or as newspapers advertisements of the time labeled it, "tamer rock-and-roll". The AC format remains with the station to this day. The station's original studio facility was a small cinder block building in Glendale, operating from 6 a.m. to midnight Eastern time before becoming a 24-hour radio station in May 1970. At that time, WQXE was the only radio station in central Kentucky to operate on a 24-hour basis. [4]
According to a snapshot at the LKYRadio.com website, the station had broadcast certain high school football and basketball games featuring teams representing Hardin County-area schools, along with some games involving the Bowling Green-based Western Kentucky University Hilltoppers football during the 1970s, which have since moved to WIEL and WTHX. [7]
In April 1972, the station reallocated from their original frequency of 106.3 MHz to 100.1 MHz. [4] [6] The station began adding beautiful music to their music offerings on September 1, 1976. [4] December 1978 saw the station moving to a larger facility at 245 West Dixie Street. [4]
The station reallocated to 98.5 MHz in 1992. The move to 98.5 was not without controversy as Bowling Green-based classic rock station WDNS, which was also broadcasting at 98.3 MHz, had announced plans to increase its signal power the previous year, which would've caused adjacent-frequency interference. [8] The move to 98.3 MHz on December 31, 1995, [4] coincided with the time that WDNS moved from 98.3 to their current frequency of 93.3 MHz.
On September 21, 2003, WQXE, along with its new sister station, Hardinsburg-licenaed WULF (94.3 MHz), relocated to its current shared facility at 233 West Dixie Avenue. [4]
On October 14, 2019, WQXE was named Kentucky Broadcasters Association Excellence in Broadcasting Radio Station of the year. Owner and founder Bill Evans accepted this honor. [9]
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