"Anyway, about 860, they did try testing 98.7 FM to try and move it to FM, but they decided it interferes too much with their own CBC radio 1 @ 99.1 FM, so they left it to be on AM."
They no longer have to do that--there is an FM alternative open for SRC that didn't exist until last month.
Since the CRTC has just yanked the license of the college radio station in Toronto on 88.1, that channel is up for grabs. It could easily be granted to a CJBC-FM with a hefty signal as long as it nulled co-channel signals to the south in NY and PA with a well-configured DA...something it could do by nulling out Lake Ontario and pulling in the signal it sends toward Buffalo and Erie, PA (where no listenership would be lost in any event). Construct the antenna right, mount it on the CN Tower and you could have a 40 kW ERP class C1 signal over the entire city of Toronto and suburbs to the north. That's exactly where the listenership of CJBC (as small as it is according to BBM) now lives.
Now you've completed the move of CBC/SRC in eastern and central Canada to FM. That leaves 860 open. There, history takes over. The Canadian government got the 860 channel, which was originally assigned to CFRB under the 1941 NARBA agreement, after the war--it forced CFRB off its channel and made it take the lesser 1010 assignment with a DA-2. If that channel ever were to open through CJBC going to FM, by law CFRB has dibs, and would probably opt to make itself a 50kW-U, NDA operation on 860 from its current Mississauga site for maximum regional coverage, not to mention a better signal toward Hamilton and Niagara 24/7. Escaping the interference on the fringe from WINS would be a major bonus to such a move.
The last domino to fall would be 1010 WINS in New York, one of the two CBS-owned newsers in the Big Apple. It then takes over the 1010 channel completely east of the Rockies, gets re-classified as a Class A signal, and gets to build a single taller tower in the Jersey Marshes and feed its 50 kW equally over all the tri-state area and up the Hudson Valley just like its big corporate brother WCBS. Give 'em 22 minutes, they'll give you the world.
Net result? One more major market FM for SRC, one more monster interference-free Class A commercial AM signal for Toronto (this time a talker in addition to the full service oldies station next door on the dial), and one more monster CBS-owned Class A newser for New York. No one loses, SRC and CFRB get something they wanted, and CBS improves its service to New York in the bargain.
