At least they're having fun with it on the web broadcast. They'll do a time check and say "if you can hear us..."

Another time, they facetiously accused a listener of "scrambling the signal."

At one point, they intimated that the signal was only "garbled" but they were still on air. If that's the case, maybe it can be heard in St. Catharines, but it's static in Toronto. 

The Secret Hour, which airs live at 6 AM, is the only thing worth listening to early Sunday morning and it's missed. But to their credit, they're carrying on and joking about the entire thing. 

Skywave wrote:

According to the History of Canadian Broadcasting web site, CKTB changed frequency to 610 kHz using five towers at 5 kw in 1960. It subsequently increased day power to 10 kW in 1964 using the same antenna array. The bottom line is that the antenna system is probably all original and 65 years old. 

I bet you are correct.

Those directional antenna arrays are impressive feats of engineering; each tower must be precisely 'tuned' or phased to interact with the other towers to create the directional pattern. It becomes even more complicated when the direction is changed at sunset / sunrise. Radio Locator says CKTB is the same pattern day night. 

Not sure how what CKTB uses for transmitters. Most stations have a main and stand by unit. When the transmitter is replaced often the old transmitter becomes the stand by but they need to be 'exercised' which probably is not done as often as it should.

I believe WABC 770 runs two identical Harris solid-state transmitters and rotates them weekly.

It's probably challenging to find a broadcast engineer that is familiar with the site (they are all different) who can arrive quickly and assuming parts are available get the station back on the air.

If the station requires more than a couple hundred thousand in repairs (which it inevitably will in the coming years), it'll sign off.... CKTB would already be losing money, so they'd be foolish to invest more into a half sunk ship

RadioActive wrote:

They're back on as of about 10:50 PM Sunday night. Not sure when they returned, but that's when I was tuning the dial and heard them on 610. It appears they were at full strength. Still no explanation of what happened. 

This is just strictly a wild guess that maybe they rounded up tower parts from the former CHML towers to help keep costs down. 

I was in the car yesterday afternoon and listened to over an hour of CKTB.  Better news and afternoon show than Newstalk 1010. The newscaster could read (unlike some on CFRB) and they had lots of local stories.  The afternoon show was casual, entertaining and host Jon Gonzo easy to listen to.  Newstalk 1010 should take note since many of their hosts seem to struggle on air too often.