Kentucky, and Washington, D.C. As a result, WAVE-TV-AM won a number of national awards, including a Peabody in 1978. Orion merged with Liberty Corporation in 1981. WAVE-TV then became part of Liberty's broadcast arm, Cosmos Broadcasting. WAVE radio was then sold off; the WAVE cluster had been grandfathered when the FCC banned common ownership of radio and television stations in the same market in the 1960s, but lost its grandfathered protection with the Liberty merger. As the radio station promptly changed its call sign to WAVG, Cosmos dropped the "-TV" suffix from the WAVE callsign in 1987. In 1991, the station began transmitting its signal from a new broadcast tower in Oldham County; the transmitter tower (which is 70% taller than most television broadcast towers), which is the tallest structure in the state, cost $5 million to build and helped to improve WAVE's signal coverage. When the Liberty Corporation exited the insurance industry in 2000, WAVE came directly under the Liberty banner; in August 2005, Liberty announced that it would merge with Montgomery, Alabama-based Raycom Media; the sale was finalized on January 31, 2006. This brought it a new sister station nearby in the Cincinnati market to the north, Fox affiliate WXIX-TV. Sale to Gray Television On June 25, 2018, Atlanta-based Gray Television announced it had reached an agreement with Raycom to merge their respective broadcasting assets (consisting of Raycom's 63 existing owned-and/or-operated television stations, including WAVE), and Gray's 93 television stations) under Gray's corporate umbrella. The cash-and-stock merger transaction valued at $3.6 billion – in which Gray shareholders would acquire preferred stock currently held by Raycom – resulted in WAVE gaining new sister stations in nearby markets, including CBS affiliate WKYT-TV in Lexington (and its semi-satellite WYMT-TV in Hazard) and ABC/Fox affiliate WBKO in Bowling Green, in addition to its current Raycom sister stations. The sale was approved on December 20, and was completed on January 2, 2019. With the acquisition of Meredith Corporation's Local Media division (including WSMV-TV in Nashville) on December 1, 2021, Gray now owns stations in every market in or surrounding Kentucky. Programming As of 2021, the only syndicated programming airing on WAVE-TV consists of NBCUniversal distributed LX.TV: 1st Look and Open House NYC on weekends, as the bulk of the schedule outside of NBC programming consists of newscasts and other locally produced programming. News operation WAVE presently broadcasts 51 hours of locally produced newscasts