Northwest Television, the original owner of Galesburg, Illinois–licensed WMWC-TV, had applied for a license to broadcast on channel 53 and had planned to sign on September 1, 2001, as the UPN affiliate for the Quad Cities television market, with operations for the proposed station to be handled by Second Generation of Iowa, owner of KFXA in Cedar Rapids.

[1] In December 2001 after receiving permission to begin broadcasting on UHF channel 26, this station began transmitter tests and on February 4, 2002, signed on as WBQD-LP with the UPN affiliation that was originally to have gone to WMWC.

It also shared its analog channel allocation with KGWB (which was licensed to and transmitted from Burlington, Iowa, to the south), an unusual arrangement for a low-power and full-power station in the same general television market.

[6] On December 9, 2011, WBQD-LP notified the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that they went silent after losing their tower lease on the Black Hawk College campus in Moline.

[10] WMWC-TV was eventually granted its construction permit on July 20, 2007,[11] and it finally signed on in August 2012 as a religious station affiliated with TBN.