: PS-NewsRadio 104.9 The Gulf Coast's Home For Rush
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Text-NewsRadio 104.9 The Gulf Coast's Home For Rush
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[Studio] Street View imagery of the iHeartMedia studios on Debuys Road in Biloxi.
[Picture] Image from a Hyundai OEM radio, showing the PTY (format), RT (RadioText) and PS (format) fields. From December 2022.
Both this station and its sister AM were acquired by Standard Broadcasting in 1967. Under their ownership, the calls changed to WCIS-FM (along with AM WCIS) in March of 1967. They kept the top-40 formats going until the AM and FM split in the mid-70's: the AM did mainstream country while the FM took on a "young country" format with some religious programming. The formats didn't work out, as the station was reported back to top 40 by 1978, now as WKKY.
In 1980, Wayne Dowdy's Jackson County Broadcasting acquired the station. They got an upgrade to a Class C2 going back in the late 80's that moved the tower site to a rural site just off Tom Gaston Road in west Mobile County, just east of the AL/MS state line, along with a boost in power to 33 kW, to try to compete in the Mobile market.
The format was thought to be urban contemporary by 1990, before the upgraded facility signed on. The call letters changed to WUNI on 1 January 1991; less than a month later, the upgraded signal signed on and the station changed called again to WZBA and went country as "Bay Country 104". It made very little impact against country market leader WKSJ. The station struggled to find a use for its rimshot of a signal into both Mobile and Pascagoula, trying oldies at one point, then going silent for a period.
Roberds Broadcasting acquired the station in the spring of 1995. Under Roberds, the station came back with an urban contemporary format as WYOK, sister to Roberds' gospel WGOK AM. In 1998, Roberds was gobbled up by Clear Channel, and sister WGOK went to Cumulus. In 1999, Clear Channel, wanting a better signal for the urban music format, swapped it with their WDWG on 104.1 MHz, which transmitted from one of the tall towers in Baldwin County. WDWG's country format and calls landed here, and the urban and WYOK calls went over to 104.1 MHz.
Perhaps in an attempt to appeal to men named Bubba, the calls changed to WBUB in May 2001. Clear Channel gave up on this being a rimshot country station in 2003, when they flipped the format to urban adult contemporary as V-104.9, in an attempt to get some listeners from Mobile's WDLT. It didn't really work, and by 2005 the station had dropped music all together to feature Premiere Radio Networks syndicated news/talk programming. By 2006, the station had signed on from a facility in the Pascagoula area, giving up on trying to compete in the more difficult (and spread-out) Mobile metro market.