Owned and operated by the Ion Media subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company, the station maintains offices on Grand National Drive in Orlando, and its transmitter is located on Nova Road east of St.
An attempt to boost its viewership by merging with channel 26 in Daytona Beach failed to get the station on cable television systems in the Orlando area.
In January 1981, Don Sundquist, owner of Broadcast Production and Management Corporation, announced his plans to apply to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to activate channel 56 in Melbourne.
Sundquist proposed a format emphasizing business news programming; he owned a company called Market Report, which was already airing such a show over WKID-TV in Fort Lauderdale.
[2] A second application was filed by a Chattanooga, Tennessee, woman,[3] but the FCC held a comparative hearing and awarded Sundquist's group the construction permit in September 1982.
The early 1980s recession had caused a potential financier of the venture to go out of business, television networks were uninterested in offering affiliation, and he could not secure funding from banks.
He attempted to sell the station—designated WSCT—to the SFN Companies, which had just acquired Orlando ABC affiliate WFTV and hoped to use it as a satellite station with local news inserts.
[18] In December 1987, Varecha's TV 56 Limited agreed to share ownership of WAYK with Life Style Broadcasting, which held a construction permit for channel 26 in Daytona Beach.
[20] Shortly after debuting, Orlando-based independent station WOFL objected to channel 26's license, claiming that advertisers were told the WAYQ signal reached Orlando when it did not.
The largest cable system in the Orlando area, CableVision of Central Florida, never added WAYK–WAYQ to its lineup on a full-time basis, straining the station's ability to secure advertising revenue.
WAYK president Bill Varecha told Florida Today in July 1990, "We have been unable to act as a conventional television station because we can't disseminate over the entire area.
[24] One stockholder in the company, Harry Handley, started the Star Television Network, which proposed to deliver classic TV shows and infomercials to affiliates including WAYK and WAYQ.
In the meantime, Beach Television Partners began seeking investors to assist in providing capital to the struggling stations; on the WAYK side, Robert Rich—former owner of KBJR-TV in Duluth, Minnesota—stepped in as a new manager.
[23] After lenders refused to give the company more time to make payments on broadcast equipment, in August 1990, Beach Television Partners filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
[32] The rebranded station continued as an independent outlet, adding several daytime shows local network affiliates did not clear[34] and a schedule of 52 games of the expansion Florida Marlins baseball team.