Broadcast area Milwaukee Area HAAT 304 meters Facility ID 63919 City of license Waukesha Owner iHeartMedia Inc Slogan Milwaukee Country | ERP 12,000 watts Class B Frequency 106.1 FM MHz Format Country music Branding FM 106.1 | |
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First air date January 1, 1962 (1962-01-01) Area Milwaukee metropolitan area | ||
WMIL-FM (106.1 FM) is a country music-formatted radio station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, licensed to Waukesha, Wisconsin. They are known on-air simply as "FM 106.1". WMIL is owned by iHeartMedia. Its studios are located in the Milwaukee suburb of Greenfield and the transmitter site is in Milwaukee's North Side near Estabrook Park.
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Current local programming is heard exclusively during the morning show with "Karen, Scott, and Radar". All other timeslots are voicetracked from other iHeartMedia markets or contain syndicated programming. Current Program Director is Kerry Wolfe who started with the station in August 1989.
History
The station launched January 1, 1962 with the WAUX-FM call sign, sister station to WAUX (1510 AM). A few years later in 1965, they became WAUK and WAUK-FM respectively, both simulcasting programming 100%.
During the 1970s, WAUK-FM aired a beautiful music format. The station adopted the WMIL-FM call sign (originally used by 95.7 FM) in December 1975. WMIL-FM went silent for a time when the owners, Stebbins Communications, which had acquired the two stations in 1975, went bankrupt. The AM station had already been sold to another company in 1977.
Charter Broadcasting, which already owned WOKY, purchased WMIL-FM in 1979. The company sold both stations to Sundance Broadcasting in June 1983, as WMIL-FM launched its present country format, competing against WBCS. As a country station, WMIL-FM has long been successful in the local ratings. In 2007, WMIL-FM was voted "Top Country Station in a Large Market".
HD Radio
In 2006 WMIL-FM installed a new transmitter with HD Radio capability on the MPTV Tower.
The station's HD2 HD Radio subchannel carries a format of current country music (iHeartRadio's "new country" station), while the HD3 subchannel has carried the broadcast audio of Fox affiliate WITI (Channel 6) since August 2009, which provides news and weather content to iHeartMedia's Milwaukee stations. This is one of the few examples of a Channel 6 station restoring their station audio legally after the June 2009 digital television transition; audio from Channel 6 stations was heard on 87.7 FM on most FM radios in television's analog age due to an anomalous quirk between the lower VHF TV and FM bands, a feature highly promoted by WITI on-air for commuters.