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City | Daytona Beach, Florida |
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History | |
First air date | September 12, 1988 |
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Call sign meaning | Orlando Telefutura (former name of UniMás), from a 2017 call sign swap |
Technical information[1] | |
Licensing authority | FCC |
Facility ID | 131 |
ERP | 130 kW |
HAAT | 428 m (1,404 ft) |
Transmitter coordinates | 28°55′11.1″N 81°19′6.6″W / 28.919750°N 81.318500°W |
Links | |
Public license information |
WOTF-TV (channel 26) is a television station licensed to Daytona Beach, Florida, United States, serving the Orlando area as an affiliate of the digital multicast network Grit. The station is owned by Entravision Communications and has a transmitter near Orange City, Florida.
Channel 26 began broadcasting as WAYQ on September 12, 1988. After a years-long comparative hearing process that featured seven applicants, original owner Life Style Broadcasting entered into an agreement to share ownership and programming with WAYK (channel 56) in Melbourne. The intention of the combination of the two stations was to put a signal into the full Orlando media market, but WAYQ's signal did not fully reach Orlando, and it was never added to Orlando's cable system. This caused financial difficulty for the joint owner of WAYQ and WAYK, Beach Television Partners, which filed for bankruptcy protection in August 1990. On June 26, 1991, a United States Navy jet on a training mission clipped the station's tower at Pierson, taking WAYQ off the air. A lengthy claims process with the Navy and the loss of advertising revenue led to the appointment of a trustee for the two stations and their sale to separate companies.
WAYQ was bought out of bankruptcy by James McCotter and returned in 1996 as WNTO, whose primary programming source was the National Empowerment Television conservative talk channel. The station also aired Tampa Bay Devil Rays baseball in the Orlando market, but attempts at higher-profile programming failed to materialize. The station was sold to Entravision in 2000 and switched to Univision in 2001, essentially upgrading the former WVEN-LP to full-power status. In 2017, Univision moved the network programming and WVEN-TV call letters to its own transmitter on channel 43, but Entravision continued to operate both stations until the end of 2021, when channel 26 lost its programming from UniMás.