Now a rock station targeted at the Fayetteville market, WRCQ began its life in 1971 as 3,000-watt easy listening WQTI, 103.1 FM, the sister station of Dunn's WCKB 780 AM. Lincoln Faulk, a well-known announcer and general manager at WCKB who would later serve as mayor of Lillington, helped start WQTI. In 1976, WQTI was sold to Rev. Garner Altman and his son, Garner Altman, Jr., and sold again in 1982 to William Belche, who changed the call letters to WIDO and branded the station as "D-103". The station was also once known as WHNI. Belche sold the station to Maurie Webster and Dean Landsman, who changed the call letters to WDKS, the format to urban contemporary and moved management and sales offices to Fayetteville in 1989. The station's transmitter remained in Dunn until late 1989 when another buyer, Metropolitan Broadcasting of North Carolina Inc., bought WDKS for $2 million. The new owners built out a construction permit that moved the frequency to 103.5 FM with 48,000 watts of power. The station also adopted a classic rock format and new call letters, WRCQ. In 1994, Kinetic Communications Inc., of Florida, bought WRCQ for $2.8 million and added a newer edge to the rock format. In 1998, Cape Fear Baordcasting, long time owners of such Fayetteville mainstays as WFNC and WQSM, bought WRCQ, and concurrently sold all of its radio holdings to Cumulus Media in 1999. The station then repositioned to the current "Rock 103" and supplemented its new rock with more classics. WRCQ shows up in Triangle ratings occasionally, and used to show up a lot more when the popular and controversial "Howard Stern Show", which has never had a Triangle-based affiliate, aired on the station for a while in the late 1990s.