paterson1 wrote:
CJQM is also 100,000 watts. Once you get outside of St. Sault Marie on both sides of the border there really isn't that much going on. So I am not sure the big signal for either is a huge factor. I think radio stations in the Sault on both sides of the border have struggled for years.
It's an interesting market, being a border town and further north than more populated Ontario locales. Stations from the Soo are frequent visitors via tropo scatter ... they aren't quite groundwave to my Kawathas site, as they're a little over 300 miles. But they're close enough that they fade in and out a lot, so I hear enough of them. 93.9 on the US side in nearby Newberry is Oldies 93, and has a nice selection. It comes in a lot, rotating generally with Windsor, Ottawa and the Erie PA area station, for the most part. Of course, they're not bound by Cancon, FWIW. the 104.3 is also frequent. It rotates with Detroit, Utica NY and sometimes Kingston and Val D'or QC. Both channels are empty enough, aside from fade-ins, that I get lots of meteor scatter signals (abrupt signals lasting anywhere up to 10 seconds, sometimes longer, from 300-1000 miles). It seems that 104.3 has been country in the Soo for as long as some of the older barns there have been standing. Well, almost. The others are less frequent. 89.5 is CBC Radio 1, and it sometimes briefly overrides CIUT. 101.3 is rock. 98.3 is NPR, also rotates with Kingston CFLY. Less frequent for me are 88.1 (CBC French, and rarely heard here), 100.5 (Kiss, I think, but Peterborough and North Bay have stations that mostly block any hope of a regular appearance), 99.5 (top 40 and blocked a bit by a Muskoka station). There's also stations in nearby US towns like Pickford, as well as the aforementioned Newberry. It'll be fun to hear something different on 104.3, and I'm not much of a new-country fan, but I'm not entirely sure what's to gain from the station's point of view. Maybe it just feels good to shuffle the deck every so often?
