WLTL, which has been acclaimed by the John Drury Awards as the best radio station in the nation five times since 2002, released an app last July that allows anyone to stream WLTL, regardless of location.

The app has already been accessed by people in states as far as Virginia, Texas and Arkansas. Even people in countries such as the Czech Republic, Japan, Austria, Mexico and the Dominican Republic have made connections.

WLTL is known as a small community radio, but this has widened its scope and enabled alumni and many others to access the station.

“The app has allowed us to encompass other media to get a bigger range and see the bigger picture,” Chris Thomas, advisor of WLTL for 10 years, said. “We’re not just a tiny [radio] station anymore.”

WLTL talked about releasing the app a few years ago, and a company was hired to make it; however, WLTL would have had to maintain it, which would have been a costly and time consuming process, Thomas said. Smart phones were also less prevalent then, compared to the vast majority of students and adults who own them now.

The app is streamed through Nobex radio, a company that takes care of the costs and maintenance, allowing WLTL to be more accessible on the app store without adding an extra work load to the station. Nobex uses advertisements to fund the app, which makes it free on the app store.

The WLTL staff can also track the amount of listeners on the app and online. The number of listeners increases especially during sporting events, and since location is not a factor, the numbers are continuing to grow because of the new and easy accessibility of the station.

“The app makes WLTL faster and easier for relatives to listen in,” Jenny Goyer ’15, WLTL music director, said. “It is allowing more people to understand what WLTL is doing.”

The station has a strong community presence in LaGrange and the app will help connect to listeners at an earlier age. It is especially convenient for those who cannot make distant sporting events. For example, the Warren football game had a large spike in listeners, Connor Hankins, a play-by-play sports announcer, said.

“The students want to make this place the best that they can,” Thomas said. “They carry it with a responsibility to keep it as good as it has been.”