WGBA-TV
WLRE, which stood for station co-founder Lyle R. Evans, sought to be operational as early as December 1977. It delayed so that it could put its transmission tower on Scray's Hill near De Pere, the location of other Green Bay market transmitter towers. Ultimately the location was approved, but it meant ground was not broken on the studio and antenna location until June 1980. The station signed on the air on December 31, 1980, broadcasting an analog signal on UHF channel 26. It was the Green Bay market's second independent station, after the short-lived KFIZ-TV (channel 34) in Fond du Lac from 1968 to 1972. It was also the first new commercial station to sign-on in Green Bay itself since WFRV-TV (channel 5) signed on in May 1955. On November 12, 1982, WLRE was able to power up a new transmitter and had plans for further antenna power boosts.
WGN-TV
Channel 9 lost its CBS affiliation as a sidebar to the February 1953 merger of ABC and United Paramount Theatres; at the time, CBS had purchased the VHF channel 4 license in Chicago (now WBBM-TV, which later moved to channel 2, forcing Phonevision off the air) from United Paramount Theatres – which absorbed WBKB's founding owners, Balaban and Katz in 1949, after a U.S. Supreme Court order forced Paramount Pictures to divest its chain of movie theaters – for $6.75 million, as the newly merged entity could not keep both WBKB and ABC owned-and-operated station WENR-TV (channel 7, now WLS-TV) due to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations then enforced that forbade common ownership of two television stations that were licensed to the same market. Following a two-month cancellation clause, all of the CBS programs that WGN-TV had been airing were moved to the rechristened WBBM-TV, leaving channel 9 exclusively with DuMont.