Stations were initially issued a series of temporary authorizations starting on May 3, 1927, which assigned WGL to 720 kHz.

[9] In August 1927, studio manager Charles Isaacson announced one of the city's first attempts at local news coverage.

WGL was organizing listeners to volunteer as radio reporters and call the station with breaking news stories.

Stations were informed that if they wanted to continue operating, they needed to file a formal license application by January 15, 1928, as the first step in determining whether they met the new "public interest, convenience, or necessity" standard.

[10] On May 25, 1928, the FRC issued General Order 32, which notified 164 stations, including WGL, that "From an examination of your application for future license it does not find that public interest, convenience, or necessity would be served by granting it.

On September 16, 1928, WGL changed its call sign to WOV[12] and was sold to Sicilian-born importer John Iraci.

On November 11, 1928, with the implementation of the FRC's General Order 40, WOV was moved to 1130 kHz, with an authorization that limited it to a schedule of daytime to 6 pm.

WOV soon became the dominant Italian voice in the Northeast through its affiliation with share-time station WBIL and Iraci's WPEN in Philadelphia.

During this time, the Italian-American accordionist John Serry Sr. was featured as a soloist in several broadcasts on WADO early in his professional career in 1931.

In 1986, Heftel Broadcasting bought the station, and over the next three years, moved to a Spanish-language adult contemporary music and talk format.

In March 1996, Heftel bought WPAT and put a Spanish MOR format there, which would later grow to cover additional languages such as Korean.

[23] On June 3, 2022, Univision announced it would sell a package of 18 radio stations across 10 of its markets, primarily AM outlets in large cities and entire clusters in smaller markets such as McAllen, Texas, and Fresno, California, for $60 million to a new company known as Latino Media Network (LMN); Univision proposed to handle operations for a year under agreement before turning over operational control to LMN in the fourth quarter of 2023.

[24] WADO was originally included in the deal, but was planned to have the transfer being completed separately while the Environmental Protection Agency conducted dredging at the station's transmitter site; in November 2023, TelevisaUnivision and LMN jointly informed the FCC that WADO would not be sold.

[25] Associated with the "Rio" treaty on AM broadcast standards, the FCC began to entertain the idea of power increases on formerly regional channels like 1280.