WOCB first signed on October 2, 1940; the station was originally owned by the Cape Cod Broadcasting Company. It was the first radio station on Cape Cod since WJBX, which operated for several months in 1926. WOCB originally operated at 1210 kHz, but moved to 1240 in 1941 as a result of the North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement. WOCB shut down in May 1943 after running out of money, resulting in its license being canceled by the FCC on November 30. E. Anthony and Sons, owner of WNBH in New Bedford and publisher of the New Bedford Standard-Times and the Cape Cod Standard-Times, bought the station's equipment and relaunched WOCB under a new license on May 6, 1944 as an affiliate of the Blue Network, broadcasting mostly network programming with some local programming, remaining affiliated with that network after it became ABC. When ABC broke into four sub-networks in 1968, WOCB affiliated with ABC's American Entertainment Network. Its FM signal, for years a simulcast of its AM signal, signed on May 2, 1948 on 94.3 MHz, and in 1962, moved to 94.9 MHz. By the 1970s, WOCB-FM broke away from simulcasting the AM during midday and evening hours to broadcast easy-listening music while still simulcasting the AM's format during weekday drive times and hourly newscasts the rest of the broadcast day. In the summer through winter of 1981, the afternoon drive announcer on WOCB was Edd Hall, who subsequently did voice work for Late Night with David Letterman from 1982–1990 and was the announcer on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno from 1992–2004. In 1991, Hurricane Bob blew down WOCB's transmitter tower, and the damage suffered was so severe that the owners could not afford to rebuild. The station was then sold to Ernie Boch, Sr., an automobile dealer in the Boston suburb of Norwood, Massachusetts, who turned WOCB-FM into the flagship station for his new Boch Broadcasting company, WXTK. Concurrently, WOCB became WUOK, and under that callsign programmed CNN Headline News, sports radio, and finally a WXTK simulcast. By 1997, Boch Broadcasting, which by this point owned four FM radio stations, no longer needed WUOK and donated it to Boston University for use as a relay of WBUR-FM in Boston, under the call letters WBUR; the simulcast began March 3, 1997. The university's 2013 acquisition of WBUA in Tisbury to serve as a WBUR-FM satellite rendered the 1240 AM facility redundant; on August 5, 2013, BU announced that it would be sold to Alex Langer, with plans to program it with Portuguese-language programming similar to that of another Langer station, WSRO. The call letters were changed to WBAS on February 1, 2014, two days after BU and Langer agreed to a time brokerage agreement.
Translator
In February 2020, W268CP changed its frequency to 106.5 in order for WKFY in East Harwich to change its frequency to 101.5 and move its transmitter to Orleans.
