After WTVQ moved to channel 36, several organizations began to petition to re-use the frequency in hope of making it the fourth television station broadcasting out of Lexington (aside from KET).
It launched in February 1986 and several months later became a charter affiliate of the new Fox network and located their studios in Lexington, effectively muting any impact channel 62 could make; it remained silent into 1987 and most of 1988.
It made little to no impact in Lexington, quickly losing money and unable to compete in any way with WDKY, and was stunted by the Family Broadcasting settlement deeming they controlled fifteen hours of the station's schedule weekly, devoted to religious programming.
[3] Channel 62 returned to the air on November 2, 1998, when B&C Communications first signed on WBLU, serving as a low-power translator station of WAOM (channel 67), which was licensed to Morehead, but mainly served the eastern portion of the market; WBLU thus provided the main signal source for WAOM in Lexington.
Timeslots outside of syndication were filled with paid programming and public domain movies, some of which were acquired only minutes before airtime from the "dollar DVD" section of a nearby Walmart.
The signal upgrade never took place as the digital transition removing channel 62 from the UHF bandplan made the construction permit unbuildable, and it was regarded as a time-wasting move on Equity's part to merely preserve the license.
The station lost its MyNetworkTV affiliation on October 31, 2008, due to both dissatisfaction by the network and viewer complaints about the loss of WWE Friday Night Smackdown from WKYT-DT2 after its move to MyNetworkTV; unlike that CW affiliate, WBLU-LP was never carried on any local pay television services, nor had Equity communicated in any way with local providers to add the station (this was despite most of Equity's stations, including WBLU-LP, being freely available through C-band satellite,[disputed – discuss] negating any need to depend on WBLU-LP's transmitter for a quality signal).
[6] Communication between local media, MyNetworkTV and Equity (which was infamous for having little to no presence of any local non-engineering staff for their stations, running almost all operations remotely from Little Rock) was non-existent to the point that the market's professional wrestling fans placed paid advertising in the Lexington Herald-Leader expressing their frustration,[7] forcing the hand of MyNetworkTV to affiliate on a station viewable both over-the-air and on cable in a critical WWE market.
[8][9][10] The secondary RTN affiliation then became primary for WBLU-LP, but was unexpectedly terminated on January 4, 2009, after a contract conflict between Equity and Luken Communications (who had acquired RTN in June 2008) came abruptly to a head with Equity terminating the RTV signal from their base in Little Rock; this resulted in Luken dropping all Equity-owned affiliates, including WBLU.