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.
WGBA-TV
On March 2, 2012, the Green Bay Packers and Journal announced that WTMJ would be retained as the "Official Packers Station" in the Milwaukee market after the expiration of the previous agreement, and that WGBA would become the official station for the team in the Green Bay market beginning in August 2012, replacing former partner WFRV-TV. As a result, WGBA carries the majority of the team's preseason schedule (the game broadcasts use CBS Sports announcers, with the "NBC Sunday Night Football" graphics package) along with "Packers Live" Tuesday nights and "The Matt LaFleur Show" on Wednesday evenings before primetime, and the "Inside Lambeau" program on Sunday nights, along with other official team programming; the station also provides gametime and 'ride home' forecasts for the "TundraVision" scoreboard displays at Lambeau Field during Packers home games. The first preseason game of 2012 was a national ESPN game against the San Diego Chargers on August 9 and aired on WBAY-TV, precluding a situation where NBC's non-preemptable coverage of the Summer Olympics would have forced WGBA to move that game to WACY instead (that situation also occurred in August 2016 due to the 2016 Summer Olympics for two games). In addition, the station also held the rights to the September 13 "Thursday Night Football" game of the Packers–Bears rivalry broadcast on cable/satellite on NFL Network, a network unavailable to much of the Green Bay market at the time due to conflicts with Time Warner Cable (three weeks later Time Warner added the network to its systems); this unusually forced the season seven finale of "America's Got Talent" to air the same night over WACY (the station's first move of NBC programming to that station in a pre-emption situation), and re-air after "Saturday Night Live" on September 15 on WGBA due to the pre-emption. As an NBC affiliate, WGBA broadcasts Packers games that are played on "Sunday Night Football". For the 2016 and 2017 seasons, the station also aired Packers appearances on NBC's portion of the "Thursday Night Football" contract.