While wandering through the Upper Midwest.

[Kevin Vahey]

Scott

Didn't the ill fated CKO all news network start this? ( You has CKO's all
over Canada in the 80's for example the former CFOX Montreal/Point Clair
became CKO)



On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 9:43 PM, Scott Fybush <scott@fybush.com> wrote:

> On 2/21/2012 5:27 PM, A. Joseph Ross wrote:
>
>> On 2/21/2012 1:08 PM, Scott Fybush wrote:
>>
>>  CBW and CBK can do what they do because they sit astride some of the
>>> most phenomenal ground conductivity anywhere on Earth.
>>>
>>
>> What makes the ground there so conductive?
>>
>>
> It used to be an ocean, and it's very moist.
>
> As for the callsign question, Canada handles things a bit differently from
> the US. There are "stations," and then there are "transmitters."
>
> CBK is a "station" - it's licensed with specific requirements about its
> programming. But in addition to its main licensed signal at 540, its
> license also includes numerous rebroadcast transmitters.
>
> "Transmitters" are kind of like translators in the US, but they can be on
> either AM or FM, and they don't have the same power restrictions that US
> translators have. Some can even originate limited amounts of local
> programming. (For many years, the Radio-Canada TV outlet in Toronto, CBLFT,
> was actually licensed not on its own but rather as a transmitter of
> Ottawa's CBOFT.)
>
> Transmitters can sometimes have their own callsigns, but especially on FM
> they usually use the parent station's callsign followed by a number.
>
> All Canadian FM stations are assumed to have the "-FM" suffix.
>
> Put those pieces together and we see that the signal on 89.3 in Winnipeg
> is thus CBW-1-FM - CBW for the parent station, -1 for the transmitter
> suffix, and -FM because it's on FM. The CBC could also have given the
> transmitter on 89.3 its own call, something like "CBWA."
>
> As Garrett notes, there's already a separate CBW-FM, carrying CBC Radio
> Two.
>
> On a similar vein, there used to be both a CBF(AM) and a CBF-FM in
> Montreal carrying separate Radio-Canada services. Both had transmitters in
> smaller Quebec communities, and it was not unusual to find a place where
> there was both a CBF-10-FM, carrying the CBF(AM) programming, and a
> CBF-FM-2, carrying the CBF-FM programming. When Radio-Canada moved CBF from
> 690 AM to 95.1 FM, you couldn't have two "CBF-FM"s, so the former CBF-FM on
> 100.7 became CBFX, and all the CBF-FM-2s became CBFX-FM-2s.
>
> (Consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds, the English CBC did it
> differently - when CBL moved to FM, the existing CBL-FM stayed CBL-FM and
> all its transmitters were CBL-FM-x, except a couple of older ones in
> Kingston and London with their own calls, CBBK and CBBL; the new Radio One
> signal on FM became CBLA-FM and its new transmitters became CBLA-FM-x.)
>
> Fortunately for the public, the CBC never announces those transmitter
> callsigns anyway, so it's just "CBC Radio 1 Winnipeg" whether it's CBW(AM)
> or CBW-1-FM or whatever.
>
>
>