50,000 WATT MONTREAL STATION, CINW (940 AM) BOOMED IN HERE, LIQUIDATED

[dumber than a box of hair]

If Mexico and Canada are *both* moving stations from AM to FM, maybe it's time to renegotiate the treaty. It seems silly to not use certain frequencies that are reserved for countries that don't want them, or to protect facilities that no longer exist in the other country (a la WWZN with CJRS and WEEI with CKVL).

I don't know about Mexico, but all dark Canadian AMs remain "notified" to the NARBA countries for allocation and interference purposes. Can't figure out why, though. It's not as if Canada plans to light them up again.

 

[Montreal radio listener]

I can remember visiting CJMS 1280 in Montréal in about 1970. At the time, it was the Francophone Top 40 station (CFOX was the English one) and was an incredible sounding facility. The staff was large compared to a US Top 40, in part due to a larger news staff as well as a lot of promotional activity.

To think that today a facility like 1280 is next to worthless. Another post raised the question of whether Canada's move-to-FM initiative has hastened the decline of AM. I wonder if that is the cause, or is it simply that the Canadians realized what was going to happen to AM at the right time to do an orderly transition.

On September 30, 1994, Radiomutuel and Télémédia merged their AM news/talk networks in Quebec. Six AM stations were closed on that day. In Montreal, CJMS 1280 was closed, and most of that station's programming was moved to CKAC 730. (CJMS had abandoned its Top 40 format in the early 1980s.)

Radiomutuel sold their 1280 transmitter site to CFMB, a multilingual broadcaster which was then on 1410. CFMB wanted a new transmitter site as their old 1410 site was adjacent to a Hydro-Quebec electrical substation. As you can guess this caused many technical problems for CFMB.

In Canada, if you apply for a frequency for which you already have a transmitter site that allows you to operate at the highest technical parameters possible on that frequency, well you are almost guaranteed to obtain the frequency. CFMB applied for 1280 with 50,000 watts, and, predictably, they were approved.

Did Radiomutuel deliberately sell the 1280 site to CFMB in order to prevent anyone from opening a new francophone station on 1280 that would compete against their own stations ? I will let you decide this for yourself.

Regarding the numerous AM-to-FM moves in Canada :

Until the early 2000s, most AM-to-FM moves were done by stations which had an old AM transmitter site in need of major repairs, and/or had a poor coverage area, especially at night, or compared to what a new FM frequency could offer. Even if the owner believed that being on AM was not or would not become a disadvantage, it made no sense in those circumstances not to apply for a move to FM.

In recent years, a sizeable number of AM-to-FM moves were done by stations in markets where all other stations were on FM. In those circumstances I think everyone would agree that being on AM is a problem, even if AM is not considered a problem by itself.

The CBC was a whole other story. In the late 1970s/early 1980s they already had long-term plans to move all of their AM stations to FM, but the CRTC believed that CBC stations should stay on AM (except for cases where there was no good AM frequency available). In the late 1990s the CBC started to apply to move individual stations, one by one, from AM to FM, and this approach was more successful for them.

 

[DanStrassberg]

All during the contentious back-and-forth negotiations between the broadcasters and Oak Parkers, followed by the actual construction of the facilites on Sawmill Brook Parkway, I figured maybe ONE million dollars might have been spent (mostly by CCU). Millions PLURAL? Any evidence of that?

There is no way that anyone could build three AMs triplexed into five towers and running powers of 50 kW-U (WKOX), 25 kW-D/17 kW-N DA-2 (WRCA), and 20 kW-U DA-1 (WUNR) for $1 million. I am very skeptical that the Oak Hill plant cost a mere $5 million. My guess is closer to $10 million and maybe even more than that (counting engineering and legal fees but NOT land acquisition--because Champion (WUNR) already owned the site). Remember also that the City of Newton imposed many onerous and costly restrictions on the use of the site. For example, I believe the radio stations were prevented from razing and replacing the Tx building. Instead, they had to gut it, rehab the exterior--without increasing the footprint, completely renovate the interior, and then try to figure out how to fit in all of the equipment. The natural-gas-fired backup generator would not fit inside and had to be mounted out-of-doors on its own concret pad. Heck, $1 million won't buy most single-family houses in Oak Hill!