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1922–2016 · the county seat's stations, addressed
The county's first station was not the Tribune's — it was the YMCA's, and it lasted six months. WBAQ, licensed to Myron L. Harmon and housed in the YMCA building in South Bend, was first licensed 29 April 1922 and deleted 7 November 1922: the city's first commercial radio station. The Tribune's station followed: licensed 29 June 1922 on the shared 360-metre entertainment wavelength, call letters WGAZ assigned from the sequential roster, it made its formal debut broadcast at 7:30 p.m. on 3 July 1922, with its first studio on the stage of the third-floor auditorium of the Tribune Building at 225 West Colfax Avenue — the newspaper's home from April 1921 for 98 years. On 9 September 1925 the call letters became WSBT, for the South Bend Tribune. In 1955 the stations moved to 300 West Jefferson Boulevard, the purpose-built broadcast house where WSBT-TV — signed on 21 December 1952, as banked — joined the radio stations; in 2009 the combo moved out to the Schurz Communications building on East Douglas Road in Mishawaka; and when the radio stations were sold to Mid-West Family Broadcasting (closed 16 February 2016), they came back downtown, to studios on East Monroe Street, the television station remaining Gray's. The flagship question answers at station strength: WSBT (960) is the flagship station for University of Notre Dame football and men's basketball and for the South Bend Cubs — the county's flagship radio voice is a sports flagship.
The Lakeville side of the test is a clean negative at licence strength: in the FCC-derived station listings searched, no broadcast facility holds Lakeville, Indiana, as its city of license. The stations a Lakeville receiver hears strongest are licensed elsewhere — WZOC to Plymouth, WNDV-FM and WRBR-FM to South Bend, WBYT to Elkhart; the market's television (WNDU-TV 16, WSBT-TV 22, WNIT 34) is licensed to South Bend throughout. Lakeville has transmitters' towers registered in its ground and no station of its own: it is a served place, never a licensed one.
Principal sources: WSBT (AM) station history and the South Bend Tribune building record (first-hand); Fybush, Tower Site of the Week, WSBT's old studios, 300 West Jefferson Boulevard (2011, first-hand); Mid-West Family closing report (2016); FCC-derived station listings for the Lakeville reception area (city-data/FCC registration data, first-hand).