RadioActive wrote:

How is that CHIN has three stations in the same market with the exact same call letters? There's the original CHIN-AM at 1540, CHIN-FM at 100.7. And somehow CHIN-FM again at 91.9. 

How can one station have the same set of call letters on three different outlets - in the same city no less? Shouldn't that last one have a different set of letters assigned to it? I believe its actual name is CHIN-1 FM. But that means two stations have virtually the same call signs on that band. I didn't think that was allowed. 

And I can't think of any other instance in Canada where that happens. 

I realize 91.9 was originally meant to be a repeater for CHIN-AM, when management somehow convinced the CRTC no one could get 1540 clearly in some areas of the GTA, so they gave them the precious Toronto FM frequency. And of course, after just the shortest of time possible, they stopped the simulcasts and it became a full time third station for the Lombardis. I still think they pulled a fast one on the CRTC.

Which still does not explain why it can be called CHIN, when there are already two of them in the market. 

Lots of examples of -1 etc... check out WTFDA database and try, say, 91.9 and ON (Province) and you'll find other examples.   https://db.wtfda.org/fac_frequency/down/1 It's same with 107.1 in CO ... I heard one of two synchros there the other day. Same with CKJX 95.5...

Saul wrote:

RadioActive wrote:

How is that CHIN has three stations in the same market with the exact same call letters? There's the original CHIN-AM at 1540, CHIN-FM at 100.7. And somehow CHIN-FM again at 91.9. 

How can one station have the same set of call letters on three different outlets - in the same city no less? Shouldn't that last one have a different set of letters assigned to it? I believe its actual name is CHIN-1 FM. But that means two stations have virtually the same call signs on that band. I didn't think that was allowed. 

And I can't think of any other instance in Canada where that happens. 

I realize 91.9 was originally meant to be a repeater for CHIN-AM, when management somehow convinced the CRTC no one could get 1540 clearly in some areas of the GTA, so they gave them the precious Toronto FM frequency. And of course, after just the shortest of time possible, they stopped the simulcasts and it became a full time third station for the Lombardis. I still think they pulled a fast one on the CRTC.

Which still does not explain why it can be called CHIN, when there are already two of them in the market. 

Lots of examples of -1 etc... check out WTFDA database and try, say, 91.9 and ON (Province) and you'll find other examples.   https://db.wtfda.org/fac_frequency/down/1 It's same with 107.1 in CO ... I heard one of two synchros there the other day. Same with CKJX 95.5...

I think the difference though it that they're almost always repeaters, which 91.9 isn't.
 

Yes, CHIN-1-FM was a rebroadcaster. But then somehow it wasn't and is now a full fledged fulltime station all its own. Yet the calls remain the same.

The Canadian rules are consistently inconsistent when it comes to those -1 call letters. It's usually true that when they're initially assigned, they're given to "transmitters" (to use the Canadian regulatory language) that primarily or entirely rebroadcast another station. That was certainly the case with CHIN-1-FM, which was originally licensed (on 101.3, for those who recall that far back) entirely as an FM booster for CHIN 1540. Similar examples include CKDO-1-FM, the 107.7 relay of 1580 in Oshawa, or CFZM-1-FM, the 96.7 relay of 740.

There's even a more intricate method to this madness: when it's a relay transmitter for an FM station, the callsign becomes Cxxx-FM-1 instead of Cxxx-1-FM. You'll never hear it announced on the air, but in Alberta, there's both a CBR-1-FM and a CBR-FM-1, and they are two completely different stations. CBR-1-FM is the in-city FM relay of CBC Radio One's CBR 1010 in Calgary. CBR-FM-1 is the CBC Music FM station in Red Deer, relaying CBR-FM 102.1 from Calgary.

Closer to home, CJKX-FM-1 89.9 is the relay transmitter in Sunderland for CJKX-FM 95.9, for example, and there are lots of CBLA-FM-x transmitters carrying Radio 1 from Toronto. Oh - and you can have both CJBC-1-FM (that's the Belleville transmitter for Radio-Canada's CJBC 860) and CJBC-FM-1 (that's the Windsor transmitter for ICI Musique, CJBC-FM 90.3 from Toronto). But that's all behind-the-scenes bookkeeping for the CBC, since you never hear any of those calls on the air. 

You can even have the -1 suffix without a -FM, in the increasingly rare cases where an AM station has its own relay on AM. The old CHVR in Pembroke had two AM rebroadcasters, CHVR-1 Renfrew and CHVR-2 Arnprior. 

But wait - there's more! Because Canadian regulations allow stations to change the status of a "transmitter" to become its own separate station, somewhere along the way CHVR-1 Renfrew ceased to be a "transmitter" of CHVR Pembroke and became its own separately licensed "station," with CHVR-2 Arnprior becoming a "transmitter" of CHVR-1. Only there's nothing requiring the call letters to change when that happens, so CHVR-1 remained "CHVR-1" until the 1990s, when Pembroke went to FM and the AMs in Renfrew and Arnprior went away. 

There has never been much consistency to those "transmitter" calls, and so there are plenty of cases where a "transmitter" has its own separate calls, too - lots of the little AMs in northern Ontario operated "transmitters" in nearby towns that had their own callsigns but not their own programming. 

There are a few I have never understood, too. In the 1970s, CHLT-FM in Sherbrooke became CITE-FM-1, rebroadcasting some, but never all, of the programming from Montreal's CITE-FM. I don't believe it was ever licensed as a "transmitter" of CITE-FM, and by the 1990s it was entirely its own separate local Sherbrooke programming, but it has always been CITE-FM-1 for whatever reason. 

And that, to make a long story long, helps explain what happened with CHIN-1-FM. It went from being a "transmitter" of CHIN to being its own licensed station, but never changed its calls as a result. 

As for the US, the -1 suffix is much more rare. It's used only for on-channel FM boosters that are meant to help fill in signal holes in a station's local area coverage, mostly but not entirely in the mountainous West. Again, it's never heard on the air, but if you're driving in the hills east of San Francisco, you might go from hearing the main KITS-FM San Francisco on 105.3 to listening to KITS-FM-1, KITS-FM-2, KITS-FM-3, etc, all without ever moving the dial from 105.3. 

RadioActive wrote:

Wow, I had never heard of any of this stuff. Thanks for filling in a lot of blanks. You're not only Fybush, you're Fybush-1 in my books!

Yes, that's not only a great answer it's the entire network!

Radiowiz wrote:

So then, is it legal what CHIN is doing with 91.9?  
Or can the CRTC force them to switch it back into a 24/7 repeater?

They applied and were approved to turn the repeater into its own station.

More great info and I hadn't even been thinking about TV stations in the mix. (Aside from City TV and maybe CHCH, I can't think of a single one that ever refers to their call letters or uses them in a top of the hour I.D. in Canada. In fact, I don't think I've even seen a top of the hour I.D. on a Canadian TV station in years.)

It seems to me Global started life as CKGN, but at some point changed to CIII, to mark their place on the cable dial. How quaint that seems today when so much is online!

fybush wrote:

RadioActive wrote:

More great info and I hadn't even been thinking about TV stations in the mix. (Aside from City TV and maybe CHCH, I can't think of a single one that ever refers to their call letters or uses them in a top of the hour I.D. in Canada. In fact, I don't think I've even seen a top of the hour I.D. on a Canadian TV station in years.)

It seems to me Global started life as CKGN, but at some point changed to CIII, to mark their place on the cable dial. How quaint that seems today when so much is online!

They did indeed start as CKGN. And here's another bit of weirdness - while most of the transmitters for Global Toronto are indeed CIII-DT-x, when they expanded up to Sudbury and North Bay, those are CFGC-DT and CFGC-DT-2. I don't believe "CFGC" was ever a separate licensed "station," though, just a set of additional transmitters. 
 

Back in the analog days, when they still signed off at night, the list of channels and rebroadcasters in the final announcement took almost five minutes! (It's so long that I half expected them to sign back on immediately afterwards because it was sunrise again.) Love the on-air stereo and audio test over the colour bars at the end of the video. 


(Video from the great Retrontario.)