CBME-FM

CBME-FM

City of license	Montreal, Quebec
Broadcast area	Greater Montreal area
Branding	CBC Radio One
Frequency	88.5 MHz (FM)
First air date	December 11, 1937
Format	public broadcasting
Language(s)	English
ERP	11,510 watts
HAAT	242.7 meters (796 ft)
Class	C1
Callsign meaning	Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Montreal English
Former callsigns	CRCM (1933-1937) CBM (1937-1998)
Former frequencies	1060 kHz (AM) (1933-1937) 960 kHz (AM) (1937-1941) 940 kHz (AM) (1941-1998)
Owner	Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Website	CBC Radio: Listen Live

CBME-FM is an English-language Canadian radio station located in Montreal, Quebec.

Owned and operated by the (government-owned) Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, it broadcasts on 88.5 MHz using a directional antenna with an average effective radiated power of 11,510 watts and a peak effective radiated power of 25,000 watts (class B) from a transmitter atop Mount Royal.

The station has an ad-free news/talk format and is part of the CBC Radio One network which operates across Canada. Like all CBC Radio One stations, but unlike most FM stations, it broadcasts in mono.

Its studios, along with those of CBC Radio 2 sister station CBM-FM, are located at Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal; master control is at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto.

History

The station was launched in 1933 on AM 1050 and was originally known as CRCM, operated by the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission. When ownership was transferred to the CBC in 1937, the station call sign became CBM and the frequency was changed to 960. On March 29, 1941, like most radio stations in North America, CBM moved to a new frequency - 940. Originally 5000 watts, the station's power was increased to 50,000 watts.

Prior to 1978 CBM broadcast from a transmitter site near Marieville. In 1978 the CBC consolidated its two AM transmitters for Montreal at a site in Brossard, on the south shore of Montreal.

The AM transmitter allowed CBM to be heard across most of the eastern half of North America at night—including almost three-fourths of Canada. However, it was all but unlistenable in parts of Montreal during the day. To solve the problem, CBM got permission to move to FM band on July 4, 1997.^[1] The FM transmitter went on the air in 1998, and the AM transmitter was shut down in May 1999—four months after French-language sister station CBF, which got permission to move to FM at the same time and which shared CBM's transmitter site in Brossard, shut down its own AM transmitter on 690 kHz.

The call sign change to CBME-FM occurred in order to distinguish the station from sister station CBM-FM.

Local programming

The station's local programs are Daybreak in the mornings and Homerun in the afternoons. The station also produces the Quebec edition of Radio Noon, which airs on all CBC Radio One transmitters throughout the province.

The station also broadcasts All in a Weekend on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and Cinq à Six on Saturdays.

Transmitters

CBM once operated a large network of repeaters across the eastern two-thirds of Quebec. However, most of those repeaters were transferred to the license of CBVE-FM in Quebec City when that station was broken off as a separate station in 1994.

Because of deficiencies with the main FM signal which did not exist when the station was on AM, CBME-FM added FM rebroadcasting transmitters with directional antennas in the western part of Montreal (98 watts, from the corner of Cavendish and Sherbrooke Streets in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce) and in Cowansville (2,700 watts).

References

External links

• CBC Montreal
• CBME-FM history at Canadian Communications Foundation
• REC Broadcast Query

Coordinates: 45°30′20″N 73°35′30″W / 45.50556°N 73.59167°W / 45.50556; -73.59167