Since you're counting CKFH (which still exists as the FAN/CJCL), there was 1280 CJJD Hamilton (which I know was CHAM before), but it morphed into 1280 CHAM in 1982, then went country in 1983, and moved to 820 KHz in late 1984.

I worked at CHNR 1600 in Simcoe, which moved to FM some time in 1994, and then became CD 98.9 (CHCD were its calls, I think).  I think it's a MyFM outlet now.

I got my feet wet at CIAM 960 in Cambridge (I think it originally was CFTJ).  When I worked there, Power Broadcasting ran a dayparted CHR/AC hybrid on it.  When they moved to FM, they were the Zone@92.9, but eventually became modern-day Dave FM.

 

RadioActive wrote:

CKEY was a legendary Toronto radio station that first tried to take on CHUM and then gave market leader CFRB a run for its money.
It left the airwaves when CJCL took over its frequency and became what we now know as the Fan 590.

WRONG! With the absence of CFGM, and no further desire to compete with CHUM for the oldies ear,
CKEY left the airwaves believing that there is a hole in the market for Country Music.
The new call letters for Country 59 were CKYC. 
This all happened a few years BEFORE CJCL took over.  CKYC/Country 59 had a good run but the sale to Telemedia caused 590 to become Fan 590.  1430 was sold to Fairchild radio.

Ah, CHIC the house on Ellen Street.  Spent some time there in the 60's.  Remember station manager Harry Allen bounding down the stairs with an LP in his hand wanting to change the music format in the middle of the day!.  That's BC radio ( before computers). 

My career in radio began at the former CKDK 1340 in Woodstock. I was one half of a two-person news department, was paid the princely sum of $720 per month and the "news cruiser" was my ten-speed bike. Shortly after I left, the station moved to FM and had a variety of rock formats over the years.The owners occasionally had their knuckles rapped by the CRTC for ignoring Woodstock and focusing its coverage on London and the surrounding area. Around a decade ago, Corus gave up the pretence of having a presence in Woodstock and moved the whole thing to London and adopted a country format. Heart FM 104 is now Woodstock/Oxford County's local station.

Last edited by BowmanvilleBob (October 7, 2023 9:00 am)

CKCB AM (I think it was 1400 khz) Collingwood was an affiliate to CKBB Barrie it morphed into a FM outlet.

1490 CFPS Port Elgin started as a rebroadcaster of CFOS 560 Owen Sound. It was part of an interesting move. In the early 1970's CHYM 1490 Kitchener moved to 570 (now CKGL) which opened up 1490 for CFPS. And I think CFOS also got a power increase to offset the potential adjacent channel noise from CHYM. Eventually CFPS moved to the FM dial and is a separate station. It might have a rebroadcaster in Tobermory.

Perhaps paterson1 may comment with more detail.

Last edited by darcyh (October 7, 2023 12:07 pm)

DOPEfm wrote:

NW wrote:

What about 1610-CHEV ?

I'm originally from Markham. I remember this station.

They stopped transmitting on AM in 2004.

Totally ceased operations in 2011.

I seem to recall a very short lived "Magic 1610", which was expected to become a Spanish station. 

CKSL 1410 London went silent in 2016.

530 CJFT Fort Erie
1380 CKPC Brantford
1390 CHOO Ajax
1450 CHUC Cobourg
1470 CHOW Welland
 

Last edited by Dale Patterson (October 8, 2023 12:17 am)

RadioActive wrote:

CKO was a poorly run all-news network across Canada that never really caught on and despite some great on air people, left the air for good in 1989. That freed up its 99.1 frequency in Toronto that allowed the CBC to transition from 740 AM to FM. 

One of CKO's major problems, aside from being on FM at a time when many cars still didn't have FM and when FM was strictly for music, is that they weren't local. As I recall even the morning and afternoon drive shows were "national", at least for part of CKO's existence. I do remember listening to it occasionally after midnight for breaking ìnternational news stories - back in the days before all-news cable channels - when the only other choice was watching the "Broadcast News" teletext crawl (remember that?)

Last edited by Hansa (October 8, 2023 9:54 pm)

Hansa wrote:

RadioActive wrote:

CKO was a poorly run all-news network across Canada that never really caught on and despite some great on air people, left the air for good in 1989. That freed up its 99.1 frequency in Toronto that allowed the CBC to transition from 740 AM to FM. 

One of CKO's major problems, aside from being on FM at a time when many cars still didn't have FM and when FM was strictly for music, is that they weren't local. As I recall even the morning and afternoon drive shows were "national", at least for part of CKO's existence. I do remember listening to it occasionally after midnight for breaking ìnternational news stories - back in the days before all-news cable channels - when the only other choice was watching the "Broadcast News" teletext crawl (remember that?)

I agree CKO suffered from too often being a national service, with only a few hourly breaks for local news. Really, how many stories about a small town in, say, Saskatchewan did the folks want to hear in Montreal or Ottawa? It's one of the reasons it was doomed from the start.

But it was also run on the extreme cheap, which didn't help. I knew a fair number of people who worked there and in the days before computers, they were working with reel-to-reel tape so overused, it often had leader tape and excess splices in it. They just wouldn't buy fresh and expected people there to reuse it forever, which was impossible.

But my favourite CKO story (other than CKEY scooping them on their own demise) had to be when former Saskatchewan politician Colin Thatcher was found guilty of murdering his wife. CKO had someone in the courtroom and he rushed out to phone in the story, which they had an exclusive on. 

The anchor let the reporter go on for a few minutes and then actually asked him this on air. "Frank, was Colin Thatcher in the courtroom when the verdict was announced?"

There was a very, very long pause as the guy on the other end of the phone tried to process what he'd just heard. Finally he said "Uh, yeees..," too stunned by the stupidity of the query to say anything else. (I wish he would have responded, "no, he just went out for coffee when they convicted him of murder...")

While they did have some excellent people there, including the great reporter Jim Morris working out of their Carlton St. studios, there was a little too much of that going on to give them any real credibility. Still, because I was friends with so many of those on the Toronto side, I was sad when it went off the air for good after its noon newscast on Nov. 10, 1989.

Dale Patterson wrote:

BN's cable news channel, from 2004. Did many a cable package back in the day.

At the local cable company, we had a dedicated channel displaying the Broadcast News service for cable.
It was a very popular service based on subscriber/customer comments.
We had the service on cable channel 16 back in the day. Late 70s to 1990 or so...

The CG box was a MSI Datacasting unit with three zones or fields...  the top field was the company name via a flashed PROM.  The larger mid screen field displayed the BN service on a slow vertical roll. And the bottom field displayed the time and "roof top" temperature from the temp prop mounted on the office roof.

We used the CTL music library service for the background music/audio. 14" open reel tapes playing back on a Sony TC-758 w/auto reversing playback.

The "wire" service was delivered to our building via a circuit from CNCP...  I remember on weekend where the service went dead...  lots of subscriber complaints to the service department, and an "inquiry" from our Gen. Mgr., so I figured I should look into this further...  Calls to BN Desk, and maybe CP ???  which confirmed that they were not having any technical problems.  I was eventually able to reach CNCP and they dispatched a technician who was MISERABLE (must have interrupted his weekend football viewing).  He had to punch down a new pair to our line...  took him all of five minutes to repair it.

We never did ad insertion on our channel for BN like the example that Dale has linked to.  This was most likely due to CRTC regulations back in the day....

 

In the Southwest 1290 CJBK and 1410 CKSL from London simply shut down. 710 CHYR, 1110 CKTY, 1570 CHLO, 1240 CJCS, and 1340 CKDK all moved to FM. Even CBC Radio One in Windsor did that. 

One other station that springs to mind is Seaside FM in Halifax, which started as an event-based station for the Eastern Passage Summer Carnival back in the early 2000s. After puling together the expertise of a lot of retired broadcasters in the Halifax area and some volunteers, the station applied to the CRTC and got a low-power FM licence for a full-service community radio station several years later.

https://seasidefm.com/

Last edited by BowmanvilleBob (October 9, 2023 9:34 am)

RadioActive wrote:

BowmanvilleBob wrote:

One other station that springs to mind is Seaside FM in Halifax, which started as an event-based station for the Eastern Passage Summer Carnival back in the early 2000s. Pulling the expertise of a lot of retired broadcasters in the Halifax area and some volunteers, the station applied to the CRTC and got a low-power FM licence for a full-service community radio station several years later.

https://seasidefm.com/

Thanks for that, Bob. Never heard of them, but it's amazing to me that anyone else ever tried this. If I recall correctly, CHEV tried to hang on over the Internet, but they eventually gave up and disappeared into history. 

SeasideFM had a rather prominent announcement on its home page that I don't think I've ever seen on a radio website before: Help Wanted.

"Interested in doing radio voiceovers? We're looking for mature female voices for commercials we produce In-house. Must have own recording equipment and be able to produce high-quality tracks. Send your examples to salesmanager@seasidefm.com. Payment is on a per commercial basis."

No problem. I followed this saga for a few years. The station was largely the brainchild of a single local guy in Halifax, who loved radio but was rebuffed repeatedly when he tried to get an on-air job due to a speech impediment. Undaunted, he created Seaside FM as an event-based station first, and then leveraged his community connections to get a community radio licence using volunteers and a few paid staffers. From my perspective, the only drawback was that the founder put himself into the afternoon drive position five days a week and well, let's just say he was an "acquired taste." Unfortunately the founder passed away from cancer a few years ago but the station lives on.