Capital East Midlands

Capital East Midlands
Broadcast area East Midlands
(from Nottingham)
Branding 96–106 Capital
Slogan East Midlands' No.1 Hit Music Station
Frequency FM:
96.2 MHz (Nottingham)
96.5 MHz (Mansfield)
102.8 MHz (Derby)
105.4 MHz (Leicester)[1]
DAB:
11B (Leicester)
12C (Nottingham)
10B (Derbyshire)
RDS: Capital
First air date 3 January 2011
Format Contemporary hit radio, News, Entertainment, Speech, Showbiz
Audience share 9.1% (June 2013, RAJAR)
Owner Global Radio
Sister stations Classic FM
Smooth East Midlands
Website Capital East Midlands

Capital East Midlands is a regional radio station owned and operated by Global Radio as part of the Capital radio network. It broadcasts to the East Midlands from studios in Nottingham. It launched on 3 January 2011 following the merger of Trent FM, Leicester Sound and Ram FM.[2]

History

The regional station originally broadcast as three stations – Radio Trent began broadcasting to Nottinghamshire in July 1975, later expanding its coverage area to central and southern Derbyshire in March 1987 with split local programming introduced for the area. The Derbyshire station was relaunched in 1994 as Ram FM. Leicester Sound was launched in Leicestershire in September 1984, just over 11 months after the county's first ILR station, Centre Radio, went into receivership.

Both Trent FM and Leicester Sound were owned by Midlands Radio until a takeover by Capital Radio plc led to the stations being sold off to the GWR Group in 1993. In 2005, the owners merged with Capital to form GCap Media, which was later taken over by Global Radio. In June 2008, Global launched The Hit Music Network on Trent, Leicester Sound and Ram FM alongside Ten 17 in Essex, Hertfordshire's Mercury 96.6 and Mercury FM in Sussex and Surrey (also Mercia FM and Beacon Black Country until their sale to Orion Media). Local programming was restricted to daily breakfast and weekday afternoon & drive time slots with networked output originating from Nottingham. Two other Hit Music stations – London's 95.8 Capital FM and Red Dragon FM in south east Wales retained local output.

On 13 September 2010, Global Radio announced it would merge Trent FM, Leicester Sound and Ram FM to form a sole regional station as part of a merger between its Hit Music and Galaxy network stations to form the nine-station Capital radio network.[3] The merger led to the closure of studios in Leicester and advertising offices in Derby.

Programming

Local programming is produced and broadcast from Capital's Nottingham studios from 6-10am and 4-7pm on weekdays and 12-4pm at weekends. All networked programming originates from Global Radio's London headquarters, including the syndicated Vodafone Big Top 40 on Sunday afternoons.

The station's local presenters are Dean 'Dino' Weatherbed and Pete Allen (Capital Breakfast), Tom Watts and Claire Chambers (weekday drivetime) and Ryan Arnold (weekend afternoons).

Capital Reports

Capital East Midlands broadcasts hourly local news updates known as Capital Reports, from 6am-7pm on weekdays and 6am-12pm at weekends with headlines on the half hour during breakfast and drivetime on weekdays. The Nottingham newsroom also produces bulletins for Communicorp-owned Smooth East Midlands.

Former presenters

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Friday, October 23, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.