The station was conceived to fill the void left when WVSP, which was licensed to Warrenton but had moved its studios to Rocky Mount in 1985, shuttered in 1987.
[8][7] Friends of Down East signed a lease agreement to move WESQ off the NCWC campus and into a city-owned building at downtown Rocky Mount that was formerly the headquarters of the Coastal Plains Life Insurance Company, though the property was also the site of a proposed library that would have required its demolition.
[17] While the station was able to find a potential location for a new studio, a studio-to-transmitter link to the transmitter site on Temperance Road could not be set up from the proposed new facilities.
[21] On March 24, 1999, WUNC began programming the station from Chapel Hill under a time-share agreement, with two workers and a handful of local productions continuing in Rocky Mount for the time being.
The move expanded WUNC's footprint to Greenville, which gets grade B coverage from WRQM; previously, the only source of NPR programming in that city was a translator of WTEB.