The station's construction permit was first issued to original station owner, local businessman Bill Evans on November 22, 1968. Two years later, the station signed on the air at 106.3 MHz on November 24, 1969, at 10 a.m.
Eastern time. The station was the first FM station to broadcast from Elizabethtown. Evans decided to give the station the nickname "Quicksie", after a
Georgia-based radio station with that nickname that he heard while attending
Elkins Radio School. The call letters were chosen by Evans himself per a vow that if he ever owned a station, he'd make sure that the call letters matched the "Quicksie" branding. The station began operating with an
Adult contemporary format, or as newspapers advertisements of the time labeled it, "tamer rock-and-roll". The AC format remains with the station to this day. The station's original studio facility was a small cinder block building in
Glendale, operating from 6 a.m. to midnight Eastern time before becoming a 24-hour radio station in May 1970. At that time, WQXE was the only radio station in central Kentucky to operate on a 24-hour basis. According to a snapshot at the LKYRadio.com website, the station had broadcast certain high school football and basketball games featuring teams representing
Hardin County-area schools, along with some games involving the
Bowling Green-based
Western Kentucky University Hilltoppers football during the 1970s, which have since moved to
WIEL and
WTHX. In April 1972, the station reallocated from their original frequency of 106.3 MHz to 100.1 MHz. The station began adding
beautiful music to their music offerings on September 1, 1976. December 1978 saw the station moving to a larger facility at 245 West Dixie Street. The station reallocated to 98.5 MHz in 1992. The move to 98.5 was not without controversy as
Bowling Green-based
classic rock station
WDNS, which was also broadcasting at 98.3 MHz, had announced plans to increase its signal power the previous year, which would've caused adjacent-frequency interference. The move to 98.3 MHz on December 31, 1995, coincided with the time that WDNS moved from 98.3 to their current frequency of 93.3 MHz. On September 21, 2003, WQXE, along with its new sister station,
Hardinsburg-licenaed
WULF (94.3 MHz), relocated to its current shared facility at 233 West Dixie Avenue. On October 14, 2019, WQXE was named Kentucky Broadcasters Association Excellence in Broadcasting Radio Station of the year. Owner and founder Bill Evans accepted this honor. ==Programming==