While the applications for transfer of ownership were part of a non-appearing hearing on February 8th, the Commission has yet to render a decision.  There were several interventions which expressed concern that the Hamilton stations would be used as a back door into the Toronto ethnic market.
While the response was that it would be "business as usual", the rules allow conventional broadcasters to have up to 15% third language programming. The Commission is probably mulling over the precise wording (in both official languages) to deal with this issue.
 

RadioActive wrote:

One pundit compares it the infamous Heidi Bowl from decades ago on NBC, when the network cut away from the final moments of an important football game for a previously scheduled movie - only to have the contest completely turned around at the last minute, and no one saw it. 

The equivalent of the Hockey Night in Canada National News incident that got Dave Hodge fired.

The FCC decision is one based on political expediency and demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of, or not wanting to accept, the engineering principles underlying successful synchronous FM repeaters:
1) synchronize everything. - a) carrier frequency via GPS satellite reference
                                       -b) synchronize the 19 kHz pilot tone
                                       -c) maintain audio modulation (and therefore deviation) within 0.1 dB
                                       -d) adjust the timing offset (talking microseconds here) to position the resulting zone of interference where you have the smallest audience. Unless you have extreme terrain shielding, there is no free ride. Some area of interference is unavoidable - it's a question of where it will be positioned and how large it will be.  The desired-to-undesired signal ratio varies between 2 dB and about 16 dB, depending on the timing offset between the two signals at the receiving location. And that's when the modulation (i.e. FM deviation) tracks. There's lots of documentation about the use of synchronous FM repeaters in Europe.

Now the craziness in zonecasting is that, by definition, it violates requirement c). If you are going to have different audio content in a target zone, the modulation cannot possibly track.

The FCC's attitude seems to be "go ahead and try it", and the commissioners don't care if they've been told that it's fraught with problems.
 

darcyh wrote:

If I understand correctly, when CHCH initially aired, they transmitted from the Wavestack antenna which was essentially mounted on the ground. The height of the antenna was only that of the height of the hill above average terrain. Would this not have severely limited the station's range?

No, the antenna was more than 500 feet above ground.  If you look at the advertisement, I think it says 565 feet.  The beauty of the Wavestack design is that you could have 500 feet of steel pipe acting as a circular waveguide, and the slotted radiating portion at the top would occupy (on the high channels) 30 to 60 feet.  CFQC-TV in Saskatoon had a 600 foot high pipe with a Wavestack on top.  It was dismantled around 1990, and the antenna remounted on top of a 600 foot LeBlanc tower.

If you want to get really nostalgic and go back to the Biondi era....
WLS Jingles Anita Kerr Assortment (youtube.com)

"PAMS Radio Jingles" "PAMS Series 18 Sonosational" "WLS 89 AM Chicago, IL" (youtube.com)
 

The lights are on but nobody's home.

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Winston Churchill

They can legislate the reception capability back into cars, but they can't legislate that it will actually work in a hostile environment. What's interesting about the Ford announcement is that they are reactivating via software, so the necessary components were there. It's quite plausible that the receivers in cars like VW actually have an AM capable chipset, because it would cost them more to have two different radio designs for internal combustion and EVs. 
Theoretically, one could sample the interfering signal from the EV's control system and digitally process it to subtract it out. It would be pretty sophisticated math and costly.  Modern broadcast transmitters do direct digital synthesis of AM and FM signals, so in theory you could work backwards.
As the old cliche goes, "it's only software".
 

Stinand wrote:

So we compare TV to radio ? And when 1010 had an 8 and 9 share, 640 was very much in play.

...and in the golden days for RB in the 60s and 70s, before 1320 became 640, CFRB had an audience share of 30% and a weekly cume of around 1.75 million. To think that it's now at 3% of its former self (on a good day).

Good on those guys for saving a beautiful piece of Art Deco architecture. Sadly, KFI Los Angeles and NBC's Radio City in Hollywood succumbed to the wrecker's ball. In the 1930s, Art Deco radio studios were all the rage, including the Daily Press/CKGB building in Timmins. Even some transmitter buildings were Art Deco, including CFRB's built at Southdown Road in 1948.
 

Yes, the L-Band selection in Canada (1.5 GHz) was a fatal choice, probably predicated on the fact that it was about the only available spectrum.  The other problem is that the Americans would never adopt it because it was a spectrum reserved for military use in the U.S. DAB in Europe was implemented in Band III (174-240 MHz), which had been vacated as a result of all TV transmissions being on UHF. In North American, Band III continues to be occupied by VHF TV channels 7-13, albeit less so since the spectrum repack. Band III has the big advantage of a lot greater distance for less power compared to 1.5 GHz.

The obsolence of the original DAB by DAB+ arose due to the adoption of AAC audio codecs versus MP2, There was no reverse compatibility.  In the case of ATSC 3.0 versus 1.0, the modulation scheme has changed from 8VSB to OFDM, which ironically is what Canada pushed for unsucessfully in discussions with the U.S. when the DTV transmission standards were being set for North America.  OFDM has been used since the outset in Europe for DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting)
ATSC 3.0 supports a plethora of modulation schemes (up to 256 QAM) and video compression schemes.  This would enable 4k video if anybody really wanted to produce it in quantity.
In the past there was a big emphasis on backward compatibility, accompanied by signficant compromises. NTSC colour was receivable on black and white TV sets, and FM stereo was receivable on mono receivers. The problem is that you can't make quantum leaps in transmission reliability and video/audio signal quality without totally abandoning the old technology.  At least for many of the radio services on DAB in the UK (such as Classic FM) there is still an analog nation-wide FM stereo network underlying it.  The standalone new services are out of luck.
Having TV and radio receivers capable of a firmware upgrade would be the ideal solutions, but the consumer electronic manufacturers would be dead set against anything that guards

Relocating any of these stations would be prohibitively expensive, in the millions, taking into account land, towers, antennas, ground system, transmitter and buildings. The only new directional AM station built in the last 15 years from scratch was CJLI AM 700 in Calgary.  All the others were co-located with existing AM stations.
 

George Mather was an excellent "old school" engineer.  Somehow they bought a dumpy motel on Lakeshore Road and the land was a long rectangle. Mather figured out how to cram a six tower parallelogram array into that narrow strip.  That's what accounts for the 60 degree spacing of the north-south towers (normally around 90 degrees). Two towers were almost at the edge of Lake Ontario, and the ground system had to be run into the lake. The other brilliant part of the design is that the major lobe pointing to Toronto had much of the path over water. The conductivity of Lake Ontario is quite high CHUM was consistently stronger than CFRB because of that.
And to think that the patterns were probably hand-cranked using a slide rule (no personal computers in 1962, and not much in the way of time-share).
The night pattern remains unchanged to this day.
The referenced chimney I think was at St. Lawrence Cement, and I believe it was subsequently detuned with a wire skirt.
With regard to all the back and forth with various Canadian and American consultants, the shoe was on the other foot in 1970 when CFRB added two 550 foot towers and removed two of the shorter towers.  Now there are four 550 footers.
It's amazing the expense to which all these stations CHUM, CHFI-AM, and CKEY went in the quest of the holy grail of 50 kW.  Legend has it that the original nine tower CHFI patterns on Burnhamthorpe Road were tuned using helicopter measurements as well, and it took months.  The day power was only 1 kW at the outset.

At 500 pm, carrier but no modulation. Lots of background noise in mid Toronto.

According to the Departmental Results Report 2021-2022 released in December of 2022, the CRTC planned to have 398 full time equivalents tasked with "Regulate and Supervise the Communications System" and an additional 149 full time equivalents for internal support services. The overall budget is over $73 million annually. It is incredible to think that it's going to take all of these people and all that money to screw in the C-18 light bulb.
COVID gave the CRTC an excuse to drag their feet for three years on routine regulatory matters, and now they have another excuse.  The fact is that probably 90% of what they do can all be done from laptop computers remotely.  The Auditor General should take a close look.