WFLF (540 kHz) is a commercial AM radio station licensed to Pine Hills, Florida, and serving Greater Orlando. It is owned by iHeartMedia and airs a news/talk format. The studios and offices are in the iHeart Orlando complex in Maitland.
The station broadcasts using a directional antenna at all times, with the signal extending to the east to avoid interfering with Class A stations in Canada and Mexico. The power is 50,000 watts by day (the maximum permitted by the Federal Communications Commission) and 46,000 watts at night. The transmitter is on Tower Pines Drive in Winter Garden. WFLF is Central Florida's Primary Entry Point station in the Emergency Alert System.
WFLF is simulcast on FM translator stations W226BT 93.1 MHz and W231CT 94.1 MHz, both in Orlando. The 93.1 translator broadcasts from South Orange Avenue at East Church Street. The 94.1 translator broadcasts from National Place at West Marvin Avenue. Programming is also heard on co-owned 107.7 WMGF's HD3 subchannel.
Programming
Weekdays begin with a local wake-up show called Good Morning Orlando with Bud Hedinger, a former TV news anchor on WFTV 9 and WKCF 18. The rest of the weekday schedule is largely made up of nationally syndicated talk shows from Premiere Networks, a subsidiary of iHeartMedia. They include The Glenn Beck Program, The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, The Tom Sullivan Show, The Ramsey Show with Dave Ramsey, The Dana Loesch Show, Coast to Coast AM with George Noory and This Morning, America's First News with Gordon Deal. WFLF has a News Share Agreement with WESH channel 2. The Premiere-syndicated Sean Hannity program can’t be heard on WFLF because it aired on WDBO. WFLF also shares Dana Loesch with WDBO.
Weekends feature shows on money, health, gardening, law, real estate and guns. Syndicated shows include Sunday Nights with Bill Cunningham, Somewhere in Time with Art Bell and repeats of weekday shows. Some evening and weekend hours are paid brokered programming. Most hours begin with world and national news from Fox News Radio. The station weather reports are from AccuWeather's meteorologists and traffic reports come from the co-owned Total Traffic and Weather Network.
History
Top 40 WGTO
On September 9, 1955, the station first signed on as 10,000-watt, daytime-only WGTO. The station was originally licensed to Haines City. It was owned by KWK, Inc., a popular station in Saint Louis, Missouri. The call sign stood for "Gulf to Ocean", as in Gulf of Mexico to Atlantic Ocean, a reference to the large coverage area afforded by the station's high power and low frequency. Three years later, the station's city of license changed to Cypress Gardens and WGTO boosted its daytime power to 50,000 watts, calling itself "the most powerful station in the nation" due to operating at the lowest AM frequency permitted with the maximum amount of power permitted.
WGTO aired a Top 40 music format from its beginning until the mid-1970s, when the station experimented with a disco format.
Country music era
On January 29, 1977, WGTO made a dramatic format change to country music, with billboards around Orlando proclaiming the awakening of the market's "Sleeping Giant". As a country station, WGTO became a ratings success and won accolades as one of the top country-formatted radio stations in the nation, including being named Billboard magazine's "Small Market Country Station of the Year for 1978". Around this time, WGTO also added nighttime operations with 1,000 watts of power.
But in the 1980s, as country music fans increasingly turned to the FM dial, WGTO lost market share to FM country competitors such as 92.3 WWKA. In 1982, WGTO was sold and the format changed to religious programming.
Switch to oldies
Another sale four years later brought another format change, to oldies as "Cruisin' Oldies 54". But the station was not profitable and most of the station's local personalities were laid off in 1992 as the station switched to a satellite feed.
Sports format
Paxson Communications, owned by Bud Paxson, purchased WGTO in 1994, dropping the heritage call letters in favor of new call sign WWZN, and installing a sports talk format, as "The Sports Zone". In 1996, the call letters were again changed to WQTM ("540 The Team"), keeping the all-sports format.