Have you been having trouble getting clear reception of QX 104 or Ignite 107 on your alarm clock radio or in the office?
Apparently the owners of those two stations have heard your complaints, and are taking steps to improve reception in Winnipeg.
QX 104 has been battling the fuzzies since it signed on in 1981 as CFQX 92.9, a small-town community station from Selkirk with little more than a fringe signal in parts of Winnipeg. A new, higher-powered transmitter and a move to 104.1 in the late ’80s allowed the station to reach a larger audience and possibly save the station from going dark.
Their equipment still wasn’t able to push a fuzz-free signal in office buildings and high-density neighbourhoods, so the station is seeking broadcast regulator permission to move from its current transmitter site just west of Selkirk to a new site near Oakbank, about 15 kilometres closer to central Winnipeg.
If approved, this should guarantee a reliable signal on even the cheapest of the city’s radios, as well as providing the Steinbach area with better coverage.
A transmitter closer to Winnipeg will leave some listeners in Gimli, Winnipeg Beach and other Interlake communities with a weaker signal.
The plan approved by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will see Ignite 107.1 close down its 920-watt transmitter on top of Chateau 100 on Donald St. and switch on a new 100,000-watt system on Highway 2 between Oak Bluff and Starbuck.
This move will allow Ignite to offer a better signal on indoor radios in suburban areas, and expand its car radio coverage to Morden, Winkler, Portage, Stonewall and Steinbach. Indoor fuzziness might continue to be an issue in the downtown area and the eastern half of Winnipeg.
The station previously had a troubled history, once shutting down for a year due to financial difficulties, returning to air, and then continuing to bleed red ink until it was sold to Golden West Broadcasting in 2008 for less than the cost of a Vancouver handyman-special bungalow.
Ignite’s move into the big leagues will reduce the city’s stock of low-powered microstations by one, leaving only 45-watt CJNU 107.9, 250-watt Kick FM 92.9 and 450-watt CKUW 95.9 continuing to operate at less than 1,000 watts.
Forget the Government of Canada ads about “clearing the snow” from Canadians’ over-the-air TV reception after this week’s digital TV switchover in Canada’s big cities. Some Manitoba communities will have nothing but snow thanks to some little-publicized changes the TV stations are making.
Manitoba’s TV stations aren’t just changing to digital. Many of them are reducing power and some are moving from tall rural towers to city rooftops, reducing their signal’s range.
CBC and Radio-Canada used to broadcast from a 324-metre (1,063-foot) tower near Starbuck, Man at 100,000 and 59,000 watts respectively. They’ll be moving by October to the roof of the Richardson Building, and reducing power on their new UHF frequencies to 42,000 watts and 7,600 watts respectively.
CTV will be staying put on their Ste. Agathe tower, south of Winnipeg, but reducing power from 325,000 watts to 24,000 watts on Channel 7.
Global has moved to the top of the former CanWest building in downtown Winnipeg, and is now on UHF Channel 40 with a power of 25,000 watts. They formerly operated from the CBC’s Starbuck tower at 325,000 watts.
Citytv will be continuing to broadcast from its Elie tower, west of Winnipeg, but will reduce power from 325,000 watts to 8,300 watts on Channel 13.
Joy TV will continue to broadcast on Channel 35 from their tower just off St. Mary’s south of the Perimeter, but will be reducing power from 22,000 watts to 6,000 watts.
These power reductions are based in part on some controversial calculations made by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which oversaw the 2009 digital transition south of the border.
Even though digital TV should require less power than traditional analog TV to produce a watchable picture, many critics argue that the Commission grossly underestimated the power needed for a station’s signal to overcome the challenges of the urban environment, where signal-absorbing trees and buildings and interference from machines and appliances take their toll on a signal.
Since there have been a lot of hits on this blog over the past few weeks from people with questions about digital TV in Manitoba, here is a pre-emptive response to the questions some of you will have as to why you can no longer receive your favourite stations — and some suggestions on what you can do about it.
If you live or have a cottage in Gimli/Winnipeg Beach…
Radio-Canada Manitoba will remain weak in Winnipeg Beach, even with a rooftop antenna, and will become virtually impossible to receive in Gimli. You’ll probably get better results pointing your antenna east toward their Channel 11 analog transmitter near Fort Alexander.
CBC might still have a so-so signal in Winnipeg Beach if you have a rooftop antenna. This signal will become very difficult to receive in Gimli. (Hint: If you point your antenna ESE, you might pick up a weak analog signal from CBC’s Channel 4 Lac du Bonnet analog transmitter. If you point it north, you might pick up another CBC signal on Channel 10 from Fisher Branch.)
CTV reception will be very poor, even with a rooftop antenna. (Hint: Viewers north of Inwood might be able to get a weak CTV analog signal on Channel 8 from the station’s Fisher Branch transmitter.)
Global, Citytv and Joy TV will be very weak in Winnipeg Beach, even with a rooftop antenna, and will be virtually impossible to receive in Gimli.
If you live in Morden/Winkler…
CBC and SRC will become virtually impossible to receive, even with a rooftop antenna. Currently, Morden is on the outer edge of the station’s rabbit-ears range, and Winkler is in the station’s rooftop-antenna zone.
CTV and Citytv’s signals will lose strength, and might be difficult to receive with an indoor antenna in the middle of town. Both stations currently offer moderately strong “Grade-A” analog signals or better.
Global should be virtually impossible to receive, now that it has reportedly shut down its old analog transmitter.
Joy TV will be difficult to receive.
If you live in Portage la Prairie…
Radio-Canada Manitoba will become extremely difficult to receive, even with a rooftop antenna. Currently, Portage la Prairie is on the outer edge of the station’s rabbit-ears range.
CBC Manitoba will only be putting a very weak “deep fringe” signal into Portage. Currently, Portage is on the outer edge of the CBC’s rabbit-ears reception range.
CTV reception will only be satisfactory with a rooftop antenna.
Now that its analog signal is reportedly off the air, Global will be very difficult (if not impossible) to receive in Portage. Portage is just outside the western fringe of Global’s digital TV coverage area.
Joy TV will be extremely difficult to receive, as Portage will be on the extreme outer edge of its digital reach.
If you live in Selkirk…
CTV and Citytv’s signals will lose some strength, and might be difficult to receive with an indoor antenna in the middle of town. Both stations’ current analog transmitters cover Selkirk with a moderate “Grade-A” signal.
Joy TV might also lose some strength, with its analog “city-grade” signal being replaced with a digital signal that might not be strong enough to overcome the ground clutter in the middle of town.
If you live in Steinbach…
Radio-Canada Manitoba, CBC and Global will all drop from good to marginal indoor reception in Steinbach. Signal quality will depend on how many buildings, trees and other obstructions there are between you and the transmitter.
Citytv will be even worse, as Steinbach sits right at the point where any realistic hope of receiving Citytv with an indoor antenna ends.
If you live in Winnipeg…
Citytv might be difficult to receive in the eastern half of the city if you’re using an indoor antenna. Signal quality will depend on how much ground clutter — such as buildings and trees — there is between you and the Citytv transmitter.
Incidentally, the stations aren’t necessarily to blame for coverage reductions. The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, the federal agency which regulates the airwaves in Canada, invited public comments on both Global’s and the CBC’s plans to reduce rural coverage — and no one objected.
A bit of lighter fare in this week’s View from Seven, as we take a trip back to the ’70s, thanks to the phenomenal video archive maintained and frequently updated by Vancouver YouTuber robatsea2009, and additional clips fromGWhizIneedAnameandronj218.
Modern-day Zellers, Wal-Mart and Target stores look like boutiques compared to the rather ugly “new” K-Mart store featured in this 1978 ad from a Cleveland TV station. But at least the musical theme is rather upbeat.
It’s 1979, and this new thing called “VHS” has come on the market, allowing you to record movies anywhere and play them back on your TV set. Trouble is, you’ll need to lug a huge camera and recorder around with you all day.
Jeez, do they still have Saturday morning cartoons? (CBS, 1975)
A young Connie Chung makes a brief appearance during a local station break in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve 1976.
Slow news day in Cleveland? This 1978 newscast (with five anchors, including one who’s wearing a tomato-red jacket) opens with a “bad news” story: yes, the price of hamburger is going up! Check out some ’70s technology at about the 03:00 mark.
A fascinating behind-the-scenes clip showing NBC’s Jessica Savitch letting loose a rant while preparing for an evening news update, possibly in early December, 1979. It’s not clear how this clip came to be in the public domain, but probably came from an unencrypted satellite feed that network staff either accidentally left open, or deliberately left open for the entertainment of master control operators at affiliate stations and the relatively few Americans who owned satellite dishes at the time.
Savitch died in a 1983 motor vehicle accident, only a few weeks after delivering a news update in which some people suspect she might have been slightly inebriated or stoned.
An even more serious meltdown by ABC News Chicago correspondent Max Robinson, recorded from the satellite feed, after discovering that network brass had decided to have a (white) anchorman in Washington do the lead-in to his story on the May 25, 1979 crash of American Airlines Flight 191 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.
Scan up and down the radio dial and it might seem that there are more choices than ever on Winnipeg’s airwaves. Indeed there are: No fewer than five new radio stations have gone on the air in Winnipeg since 2000.
Despite the increased variety over the past decade, the local radio market continues to be dominated by just a handful of veteran stations. Though a total of 28 stations put a reasonably solid signal into Winnipeg, the top five — CJOB, Hot 103, CBC Radio One, QX-104 and Power 97 — accounted for nearly 60 percent of all listener-hours in Fall 2010, while the top 10 stations accounted for slightly more than 85 percent of listener-hours.
Now here’s a primer on the also-rans in the Winnipeg radio market — the stations you might not have known existed.
810 CKJS Winnipeg
Format: Ethnic (primarily Filipino); some religious programming
Morning Show: “Good Morning Philippines”
Afternoon Drive Show: “Afternoon Pasada”
Survival Strategy: Target niche audiences, not the general public. Rely on community to generate low-cost programming.
On air since: 1975
Ownership: Newcap Radio
Transmitter: 10,000 watts, located off Waverley south of the Perimeter
Survival Strategy: Target the Red River College campus
On air since: 2004
Ownership: Crecomm Radio
Transmitter: 250 watts, located at the RRC Notre Dame campus
Signal quality in Winnipeg: Good within a kilometre or two of campus, probably acceptable in most of northwest Winnipeg if your radio has an antenna. Strictly a rimshot signal (i.e., passable on a car radio but too weak for reliable indoor reception) for those living east of the Red River or south of the Assiniboine or in the middle of downtown.
Survival Strategy: Volunteer support, and use a temporary “special events” broadcasting licence to get a foot in the door
On air since: Intermittently since 2006, pending the awarding of a permanent broadcasting licence
Ownership: Nostalgia Broadcasting Cooperative
Transmitter: 45 watts, located on top of an Osborne Village high-rise
Signal quality in Winnipeg: Should be good in the centre of the city, might require an antenna in some older post-war suburbs. Strictly a rimshot signal if you live out beyond Assiniboine Park, Lagimodiere Blvd., Bishop Grandin or the Chief Pegius Bridge. (Which is probably not bad if your transmitter is less powerful than most lightbulbs!)
Are you a former employee or an old fan of CJAY, CKY, KCND or CKND? Have any interesting stories about what happened behind the scenes or on-air? Then The View from Seven wants to hear from you! Read on, and then share with us your stories and your memories in the comments section below! Comments never close, and the readers keep on coming week after week.
Dr. Andrew Stewart and his fellow members of the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG) certainly couldn’t have been accused of going on a junket, arriving as they did in Winnipeg in the middle of January, 1960.
As the members of the BBG — which regulated Canada’s airwaves from 1958 to 1968 — and a crowd of observers gathered in a seventh floor meeting room at the Fort Garry Hotel, the city outside was enveloped in a dull, grey light freezing drizzle that started in the morning and continued into the mid-afternoon.
It was a good day to be indoors watching the meeting that was the talk of the town: the BBG’s public hearings which would determine who would be granted the valuable Channel 7 television licence that would finally break the CBC’s monopoly on Winnipeg television.
The people gathered at the Fort Garry Hotel that day represented a Who’s Who of Winnipeg society.
The first application was heard from R. S. Misener and Associates, backed by the Moffat family which owned Winnipeg’s CKY radio station, Investors Syndicate president T. O. Peterson and the owners of CKSB Radio in St. Boniface and CFAM Radio in Altona.
The proposed station could be “a potent and positive force in our society… exploring new frontiers of the mind… and bringing about all that is good in our cultural community,” Misener vowed to the Board, before going on to present a programming schedule that included game shows, five-pin bowling, cooking and sewing shows and a Saturday late night movie called “The Owl Prowl”.
The second application was presented by Red River Television, backed by Great-West Life chairman Joseph Harris, the Sifton and Richardson families, and Winnipeg Free Press publisher R. S. Malone. A morning “Breakfast Club” program based on NBC’s “Today” show would be the anchor program in the station’s schedule, along with local music and homemaker programs and a wide range of popular U.S. programs in prime-time.
The final application was presented by Perimeter Television, fronted by CJOB founder Jack Blick and supported by lawyer Graeme Haig and other investors. Perimeter was vague on how it would program its station – which presumably would have operated as CJOB-TV — aside from a promise that its newsreaders would deliver the news in “perfect English”.
Ultimately, the Misener application was given the green light.
Later, the BBG — staffed at the time by appointees of the Diefenbaker Conservative government — would face accusations that licences were given out based on political considerations.
The Misener group were reasonably discreet in terms of their political preferences, but could partisan considerations have cost Red River Television its chance at winning a TV licence, given the principals’ Liberal Party connections?
William Hull noted in his 1994 book on the history of the Board of Broadcast Governors that the accusations of partisan favouritism mainly swirled around the granting of a Toronto Channel 9 licence to a group led by John Bassett, a well-known Conservative; and in permitting CKVR-TV in Barrie, Ont., whose owner happened to be a former Liberal candidate, to expand its signal to cover the lucrative Toronto market later in the ’60s.
If there were any complaints about politics being a factor in determining the outcome of the Winnipeg hearings, they were discreet ones.
Hull concluded that some members of the Board who were in charge of choosing a licence winner were “actively involved in partisan political activities, and some clearly looked for some personal gain from this,” but also observed that if the Board’s decisions were political, board members were careful to leave no evidence behind.
Having presumably won the licence in January 1960 on the basis of merit — in the absence of any evidence to the contrary — the Misener group would have to work quickly to get their station on the air.
The reason: There was competition coming from south of the border.
In 1956, a group of investors associated with a Grand Forks radio station won permission from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to construct a new Channel 12 TV station in the tiny border town of Pembina, N.D.
Their goal, however, wasn’t to serve Pembina and the sparsely populated surrounding area. It was to serve Winnipeg audiences, 100 kilometres to the north, and hopefully make some money satisfying Canadians’ insatiable appetite for American TV programming.
The station was slow to get to air, though. It wasn’t until early 1959 — nearly three years after they were awarded the licence — that the serious work of building studios and erecting a tower got under way.
Now with a second Winnipeg station under construction at Polo Park, it became urgent for the Pembina operation to finally get up and running.
Thus began a mad race between the owners of Channel 7 and Channel 12 — which would become better known as CJAY-TV and KCND-TV later in the year — to beat the other station to air.
“The idea of KCND was to come into the (Winnipeg) market as the second station, but in the interim the licence was granted to CJAY, so they were building at the same time,” former KCND-CKND employee Dorothy Lien told the Winnipeg Free Press in 1989.
“It was a great race between the stations to see who would get their tower up [first],” she recalled. “I remember driving down to Pembina in September of 1960 to watch our antenna being mounted, and then driving back to Ste. Agathe to see that they were at the stage of getting theirs up, too.”
The race was as close as one got to a photo finish in the broadcasting industry.
On Sunday, Nov. 6, 1960, Winnipeggers noticed a test signal coming in from Pembina on Channel 12. On Monday, Nov. 7, the half-finished station went on air at 6 p.m. with a limited program selection, owing to the fact that the station was literally not yet connected to the ABC and NBC networks from which it would obtain most of its programming.
Given that the only other option in Winnipeg was to watch the CBC station, viewers weren’t exactly choosy.
Five days later, at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 12, 1960, CJAY-TV Channel 7 signed on from a brand-new studio next to Polo Park Shopping Centre.
Though CJAY had lost the race to air, it still had a decided advantage over its cross-border rival.
“We had very low power and very poor microwave [linking the station to the networks],” Lien told the Winnipeg Free Press in 1989. “We really didn’t make an impact for about six years. People didn’t have the antennas to bring in Channel 12.”
KCND had been modeled after KVOS-TV, a small outlet in Bellingham, Wash., just across the border from Vancouver, which discovered that there was big money to be made in buying programs at low Bellingham rates and selling advertising at high Vancouver-Victoria rates.
The practice was controversial, given that KVOS was at times selling advertising on programs for which a B.C. broadcaster had supposedly purchased “exclusive” rights; but it also made KVOS one of North America’s most profitable TV stations for a time.
But there was a critical difference between KVOS and KCND.
KVOS’s transmitter was only 70 kilometres from central Vancouver and just 45 kilometres from Victoria, close enough to put a strong and clear “Grade-A” signal into those communities, as it still does today.
KCND’s transmitter was 100 kilometres from central Winnipeg. Its “Grade-A” signal only went as far north as Niverville, beyond which ground clutter and weather tended to interfere with reception.
Given that there were no cable systems in Winnipeg at the time, it was an oversight on the part of the station’s owners that threatened to bankrupt the station.
“Our signal was never as strong in Winnipeg as our engineers thought it would be,” lamented Boyd Christenson, an early KCND announcer and program host who was interviewed by the Winnipeg Free Press in the mid ’80s. (* – see footnote)
“We weren’t getting the dollars we needed out of Winnipeg to sustain the station,” Christenson said, describing the station’s financially troubled early years.
The station’s fortunes dramatically improved after the arrival of cable TV in Winnipeg in the late ’60s.
KCND’s survival in the early years was no doubt driven by the fascination that many Manitobans had for the glamour of Kennedy-era America and a yearning for something different on their screens, which led to a cult following in Winnipeg.
“KCND was strictly bargain basement,” former Winnipeg resident Greg Klymkiw wrote in a June 2010 article for the Electric Sheep web site. “Though to kids, tired of fiddlers from Newfoundland and joyful Canucks winning useless pen and pencil sets on stupid Canadian TV, KCND was… AMERICA!”
“I kind of fell in love with KCND-TV Channel 12,” a commentator named Rob wrote to The View from Seven in November 2010. “For some reason the channel 12 logo was very cool!”
“My dad’s bedroom TV had only local stations, but he got channel 12 by installing an interior Channel 12 Antenna… sometime in ’71 or ’72 but we weren’t allowed to use his TV. My younger brother used to sneak in there and watch reruns of ‘Lost in Space’ at 6 PM while my dad was working evenings,” Rob wrote.
“Sometimes my dad called us to his bedroom to watch ‘Chiller Thriller’ at 10:30 PM Saturday night,” he added, referring to the station’s popular Saturday night horror movies.
On the Canadian side of the border, CJAY-TV was not only putting a cleaner signal into Winnipeg, but also benefitting from its ability to purchase programming from all three U.S. networks between its commitments to the CTV Network, which it joined as a founding member in 1961.
CJAY also had a wide range of local programs, many of them live. This made early local TV unpredictable and, at times, hilarious.
“One time we were doing a game show,” longtime CJAY-CKY employee Fred Harland told the Winnipeg Free Press in 1989. “And this truck driver walked right through the middle of the shot.”
“Of course, this was a live show. Everybody laughed, but nobody said anything, then two minutes later he came back the other way. I guess he was finished making his delivery.”
“So the host — I think it was Stew MacPherson — stopped him and said, ‘Sir, do you mind if we talk to you for a second?’”
“This guy didn’t know what was going on. So Stew walked over to him and said, ‘Do you know you’re on television right now — for the second time?’”
“And the guy looked right at the cameras and said, ‘My ol’ lady’s gonna — (expletive) when she sees this.’”
Pranks were also common. CJAY sportscaster Jack Wells was the victim of one prank where the telephone that was placed on the news set for decorative purposes started ringing while he was on the air.
“I just picked it up and said, ‘OK honey, I’ll be home for dinner in about 20 minutes,’” Wells told the Free Press in 1989.
“Videotape has made boy geniuses out of a lot of people,” former announcer and program host Al Johnson said in a 1980 special marking CJAY-CKY’s 20th anniversary. “But live television — that was the trick.”
“To be able to withstand two or three or five years of that was a killer. You’d end up in the booby hatch today. A lot of our good friends did. Hit the bottle…”
“Let’s not tell those stories, Al,” host Ray Torgrud interrupted.
Another favourite victim of pranksters at CJAY was “Uncle Bob” Swarts, who hosted a popular children’s show called Archie and his Friends from 1965 to 1986.
In the same May 1989 interview — just two weeks before Swarts’s death on June 9, 1989 — Harland recalled an on-air prank where one of the puppets, a dog named Petite, was the victim of a gunpowder-filled birthday cake that exploded as the puppet leaned over to blow out the candles.
“There was shrapnel flying everywhere. The dog was scorched and Uncle Bob’s eyebrows were singed… and after he cleared the smoke out of his lungs, Bob didn’t know what to say. So we went straight to commercial.”
In spite of the early bloopers and financial struggles, both stations survived.
The Moffat family, which owned CKY Radio for decades and were early investors in CJAY, bought out the station’s other owners in 1973. For consistency, the Moffats rebranded CJAY-TV as CKY-TV on June 1, 1973. The station remained in its original Polo Park studio until relocating to downtown Winnipeg in 2006.
Canwest Broadcasting, headed by Paul Morton, Izzy Asper and Seymour Epstein, took over KCND in late March 1975 and proceeded to consolidate the station’s Pembina, N.D. and Winnipeg studios (then located at Portage and Winchester in St. James, but deemed unsuitable for Canwest’s needs) under a single roof on St. Mary’s Road in St. Vital. The rebranded all-Canadian operation took to the air as CKND on Aug. 31, 1975.
As both stations celebrate their 50th anniversaries this week, take some time now to journey down memory lane. Then share your memories of local television in the comments section. (I’m particularly interested in hearing from former employees of CJAY, CKY, KCND or CKND as to what was best and worst about working at those stations.)
(* – Technically, it would have been possible for KCND or later KNRR to put a higher quality Grade-A signal into the southern half of Winnipeg, but they both erected their tower on the wrong side of the North Dakota-Minnesota border. According to the Radio Coverage Prediction utility on the Communications Research Centre Canada web site, a Channel 12 station running 220kW from a 600-metre tower on the higher terrain 30 kilometres east of Pembina would have put a Grade-A signal into Winnipeg. They could not have done this from the lowlands west of Pembina, where both stations located their 427-metre towers.)
CJAY-TV goes on the air, Nov. 1960 (Click to enlarge. Thanks to rob1961 for the file.)
An early CJAY-TV local game show called “Lucky Seven”, hosted by Al Johnson, believed to be from either 1960 or 1961 (Source: Archiewood)
Portage and Main might be renowned as the windiest street corner in Canada. It could soon be the street corner most heavily bathed in electromagnetic radiation as well.
A few months ago, this blog reported that Global Winnipeg’s decision to move its transmitter 30 kilometres, from a CBC-owned tower just off Highway 2 near the village of Starbuck to the roof of the Canwest tower at Portage and Main, would mean that any rural Manitobans living more than 60 kilometres from Winnipeg and not yet on cable or satellite would have to switch by September 2011 if they want to keep watching the station.
Now it turns out that the CBC itself is also abandoning the Highway 2 site, and moving both its local English and French-language television transmitters to the top of the Richardson Building.
As with Global, this means that large parts of southern Manitoba will no longer have access to CBC Television without a cable or satellite subscription after the mandatory switchover to Digital TV at the beginning of the 2011-2012 television season.
According to the CBC’s application to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), their English signal after that date will only extend south to Morris, north to the southern edge of Lake Winnipeg, west to about half-way between Elie and Portage, and east to La Broquerie and Richer. The French signal will cover a slightly smaller area.
If you live in Portage, Morden, Winkler or Emerson and don’t have cable or satellite, you won’t have a CBC signal to watch after Aug. 31, 2011. Even if you live in Beausejour or St. Malo, you’ll need to replace your rabbit-ears with a rooftop UHF antenna if you want to continue receiving a reliable CBC signal without having to pay for cable or satellite.
Yes, that’s right — a UHF antenna.
Channels 2 to 6 – at the low end of the VHF band — are hostile places for a digital signal. That bit of interference caused by your parents’ electric carving knife or by an atmospheric disturbance causing TV stations in Tennessee to suddenly become receivable in Manitoba can make a complete mess of a digital signal.
Channels 7 to 13 — the upper end of the VHF band — are a little more interference-resistant. But UHF channels 14 to 51 are the most interference-resistant of all.
So UHF has gone from being television’s skid row — inhabited, according to longtime industry stereotype, by low-budget stations that made just enough money so that the station manager could hire an exterminator once in a while to get rid of the rats and roaches — to being the coolest neighbourhood on the dial, in less than a generation.
There’s just one hitch: most outdoor aerials in Manitoba were designed for VHF, not UHF, which could cause reception problems.
If approved by federal regulators, CBC’s English TV signal will be moving from channel 6 to channel 27, while the French-language service will be moving from channel 3 to channel 51 by next year’s Labour Day weekend. The deadline to make any objections known to the CRTC is October 26.
In other local television station news, the CRTC has dismissed a complaint about Jack Van Impe Presents, a paid-time religious program aired on Global Winnipeg. This stemmed from a 2009 complaint originally filed with the station and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council by an unnamed viewer, who claimed that the program is “inappropriate for daytime hours when children could be watching, as they will be traumatized”.
In particular, the complainant was irked by the impication that “only Christians will be saved when doomsday comes in 2012″ and that “anyone who is not Christian will suffer a horrible death”.
In their weekly program, Michigan-based televangelists Jack and Rexella Van Impe present their case that Barack Obama and the European Union are harbingers that the world is imminently about to experience “the rapture”. When this happens, according to the Van Impes, selected Christians will suddenly disappear into Heaven, leaving everyone else behind to deal with the resulting chaos.
As the following excerpt from a May 31, 2009 broadcast shows, these doomsday scenarios are frequently interrupted by sales pitches for DVDs:
Jack: Well, as you know, Kissinger said we are preparing Obama to create the new world order and Brown is pushing Blair, really his enemy in the past in the U.K., to become the first permanent president of the European Union because he says “I want Blair to be a partner with Obama in the creation and architecture of the new world order.” Every sign that you hear, every sign from Revelations chapters 6 to 18 occurs during the reign of the leader of the new world order. It’s the final sign. I can’t emphasize it enough.
Rexella: All right. Friends, we need to be focussing on the fact that the Lord could come very, very soon. That is good news. We’re going to get on with more global headlines in just a moment. But let me just say that, whoa, you want to get your call in right away. We’re really trying to get them out as fast as we can [holds up DVD]. New World Order Rising, our wonderful offer of the week.
Most of us can recall at least one occasion where we’ve come across something on television that was so boring or repulsive that we asked ourselves, “My God, who watches this stuff?”
The easiest way of figuring that out is to watch the commercials. If they show a bunch of young guys getting together for a good time, it’s safe to assume that the audience is heavily skewed toward males aged 18-29. If the ads are for prestigious Wall Street investment firms and high-end hotel chains, however, the audience is more likely skewed toward middle-aged and older professionals.
Spend half an hour watching CBC News Network and — despite the youthfulness of newer personalities such as Nil Koksal and Kalin Mitchell — you’ll quickly get the sense that the viewership of all-news channels skews toward the 55-plus demographic. Young adults, after all, are not key customers of no-medical-exam-required life insurance, Grey Power car insurance, contraptions that make it easier to get in and out of the bathtub or of the various other advertisers that help keep the CBC News Network on the air.
Their children are more likely to be watching lighter fare when they turn on the television. The typical “Family Guy” viewer is 30 years old, making it one of U.S. network television’s youngest shows. “The Office” (median age: 35 years) and “Scrubs” (38 years) also tend to attract a younger audience.
Surely this news must give pause to backers of the proposed Sun News Channel, which some have billed as “Fox News North” in recognition of Sun Media’s small-c conservative leanings. Not only would a new all-news channel fragment a Canadian market that is only a fraction the size of the neighbouring U.S. market — and less partisan to boot — they would also be dependent on many of the same accounts that CBC News Network and CTV News Channel depend on. Then again, perhaps their plan is to force one of the two incumbents out of the game. Only they would know for sure.
It also makes you wonder if the greying of the all-news audience portends a less well-informed Canada of the future. The old way of watching the news — a 10 p.m. date with Knowlton Nash or an 11 p.m. session with Lloyd Robertson — might be old-fashioned and no longer practical in an era when you can click on the stories that interest you and ignore the rest, but at least you learned bits and pieces about politics and the economy while you were waiting to hear about the latest celebrity scandal.
Now… who cares about China or what effect interest rates will have on your household finances when your mortgage comes up for renewal? Lohan’s in trouble again!
On the bright side, we’ll simply do what human beings have always done when confronted with a changing world: adapt to it. And instead of hearing about what effect events overseas might have on Canadians’ lives from CBC’s Peter Mansbridge and CTV’s Lisa LaFlamme, we’ll get Family Guy‘s Peter and Lois Griffin to raise the subject.
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On a completely different subject, several of us Winnipeg bloggers are making plans to converge later this month for beers and to finally meet one another in person. Visit the Winnipeg Bloggers group on Facebook or contact me via e-mail (mcdougak[at]mts.net) to find out more.
(Update, Aug. 13: The CRTC today approved Canwest Global’s application to relocate its transmitter to Portage and Main. This means that, after Aug. 31, 2011, Global’s over-the-air signal will disappear completely in Portage, Morden, Winkler, Carman and in Lake Winnipeg cottage country, and will be considerably weaker in areas shaded in blue or gray on the map below. The CRTC noted that it “did not receive any interventions in connection with this application.”)
If you’re one of the dwindling number of Manitobans who uses a rooftop or indoor antenna to get your television stations, get ready to hear a lot more in the year ahead about the changes you’ll have to make to prevent your screen from going blank after Aug. 31, 2011.
That’s the day when Canadian television stations will be required to shut down their traditional analog transmitters forever and switch over to a digital signal. It will have no effect to the vast majority of Canadians who are on cable or satellite, but will leave everyone else unable to receive any TV signals unless they’ve purchased a new television set or, at least, a digital converter box.
For some rural Manitobans who still rely on an antenna to tune in to Global Winnipeg’s program lineup, however, even the best preparations for the digital switchover might not be enough.
Global Winnipeg — still sometimes referred to as CKND — has a bit of a problem on its hands. The station has been paying rent to the CBC since 1975 to use their 324-metre (1,064-foot) tower southwest of Winnipeg to beam their signal across southern Manitoba.
For technical reasons, however, Global has been forced to look elsewhere for a new transmitter site to operate from following the 2011 digital switchover. They’ve decided, appropriately enough, that it would be best to transmit from the top of the Canwest tower in downtown Winnipeg.
If Global’s plan to transmit from Portage and Main is approved, the station’s signal will no longer be receivable in Portage, Carman, Morden, Winkler or in cottage country north of the Netley Marsh after the 2011 digital switchover. (If you’re on cable or satellite, it’s unlikely you’ll be affected.)
As part of the CRTC’s public participation process, the Commission is asking any citizens who have concerns about Global’s proposed changes to submit their comments by July 5. Instructions on how to do this can be found on the CRTC web site.
Speaking of digital television, in case you missed it, fellow blogger Reed Solomon raised an interesting point in response to this blog’s earlier post on the 1986 Detroit vs. North Dakota cable TV fight, which nearly cut off Fargo-based Prairie Public Television from the many Manitobans who had not just been loyal fans of but also financial contributors to the station for years. He wasn’t pleased with the station for not putting a digital over-the-air signal into Winnipeg.
It’s not a bad question: why hadn’t Prairie Public ever put a signal into southern Manitoba, a market that accounts for roughly one-half of their viewers and a good number of their financial backers. (Even some of their own board members live in Manitoba.)
As a U.S. company, they couldn’t have legally received a Canadian broadcasting licence due to foreign ownership restrictions. An opportunity was readily available between 1975 and 1979, however, when they could have applied for an unused frequency just across the border in North Dakota that would have reached Winnipeg. It was an opportunity left ungrasped that nearly cost them the loss of half of their audience in 1986.
After 1979, a Fargo businessman had already obtained the rights to use that frequency, which would have forced Prairie Public on to a less desirable UHF channel if it wanted to put a signal into southern Manitoba.
Being on UHF was a liability back in the analog days, but can be an asset in the digital era because of differences in how an analog signal and a digital signal reach the viewer. So why does it still seem unlikely that Prairie Public will make a move into southern Manitoba?
Probably because of technological changes. They’ve been able to get a cleaner signal on to Winnipeg’s cable systems for a number of years now without going to the expense of setting up a new transmitter, thus securing their place in the Manitoba market. And the number of viewers they’d gain by having an over-the-air signal north of the 49th parallel would be marginal. So why go to the trouble?
Not to mention that Winnipeg – their key Manitoba market — would be just on the outer edges of their coverage area, as the hypothetical coverage map below for a hypothetical high-powered UHF station operating from Red River Broadcasting’s 427-metre Pembina tower shows. (However, as the second map shows, a UHF station operating from a 600-metre tower on the higher ground near Lancaster, Minn., about 30 kilometres east of Emerson and Pembina, would bathe Winnipeg with a 60 dBu signal, strong enough to allow reception with an indoor antenna.)
Nevertheless, it would be interesting to know if Prairie Public ever did contemplate such a venture into Winnipeg and southern Manitoba. Does anyone currently or formerly with the station have anything to share?
It was a debate that divided the community, pitting Winnipegger against Winnipegger. The newspapers covered every development, radio talk shows took passionate calls from both sides, and even U.S. television stations sent reporters to Winnipeg so that their viewers could find out what all the fuss was about.
It was the great North Dakota vs. Detroit debate of ’86.
It all started when Videon, the cable company that then served the western half of Winnipeg, proposed dumping the four North Dakota TV stations it carried — PBS affiliate Prairie Public TV, CBS affiliate KXJB, ABC affiliate WDAZ and NBC affiliate KTHI — and replacing them with four stations via satellite from Detroit.
The pro-Detroit camp in Winnipeg argued that Videon’s plan would mean better picture quality — no more problems with the U.S. network stations becoming barely watchable every time a blizzard or thunderstorm crossed Interstate 29 — along with more movies, more sports and 24-hour programming. The pro-North Dakota camp argued that we were cutting our ties to our peaceful Red River Valley neighbours and threatening to corrupt our youth with Detroit’s “if it bleeds, it leads” newscasts.
In March 1986, a compromise was announced: the weaker Fargo NBC and CBS signals would be replaced by the Detroit equivalents, while the stronger Grand Forks ABC and PBS signals would stay put, government regulators decreed.
It was an eventful year in local broadcasting. In the midst of the North Dakota vs. Detroit debate, Winnipeggers were also investing in rabbit-ears antennas in hope of picking up Star Trek re-runs and Madd Frank’s Saturday night horror movies following KNRR-TV’s Jan. 1, 1986 launch from Pembina, N.D. And in May, Winnipeggers weighed in on whether or not the unassigned channel 13 licence should be awarded to a Portage-based commercial station called CPLP-TV (renamed 13 MTN before it launched the following October) or a Winnipeg-based educational station called Manitoba Public Television (which obviously never made it to air).
It was also the first full year in operation for the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, an interest group formed the previous year in opposition to the Mulroney government’s funding cuts to the CBC.
“How you can fight back to restore the CBC to its former glory,” reads one of their fundraising letters. “The CBC is a cultural conduit connecting our coasts, carrying thousands of expressions of our diverse national heritage each year — as important to our country as the St. Lawrence Seaway, the national railways and the Trans-Canada Highway.”
This quaint, flowery prose certainly sounds like something that might have been written in 1986. It actually wasn’t written all that long ago — it just arrived today, a six-page essay labeled “Exposed — Stephen Harper’s secret plan to destroy the CBC”.
Coincidentally, this missive arrived on the same day as an announcement which could have a far more profound effect on Canadian broadcasting than the $200 million CBC funding cut, CBC Radio 2 format changes and the pre-emption of Marketplace in favour of Jeopardy!, among other things the Friends essay bemoans.
The CBC’s Mrs. Brady — a cultural conduit since 1957
This far more important announcement? Yes, Google is getting into the TV business.
Not as a broadcaster or producer, of course, but as a search engine that will allow users to “look through live programs, DVR recordings and the Web, delivering a relatively compact list of results that can be accessed with a push of the button,” according to Reuters.
The real test of the technology will be this fall, when Sony will introduce a line of Internet TVs and Logitech International launches an adaptor that will bridge the gap between the Internet and existing high-definition TVs.
This, however, is a mere preview of what’s to come when a wireless router in your home will allow you to bypass the traditional broadcasters, cable operators and regulators — when you’ll be able to access Google through your TV set to find the programs you want to watch, or set your alarm clock radio to wake up to a nearly commercial-free online radio station like France’s Live 9.
It’s a change that could turn the Canadian broadcasting industry on its head — and call the very existence of the CBC into question, given that its mandate is rooted in an era when its programming was one of just a handful of options on radio and television.
Funny that the Friends’ fundraising letter doesn’t mention that, opting instead for prose about the CBC as a “cultural conduit connecting our coasts” that sounds as dated as the ’86 North Dakota vs. Detroit debate and the aging, weather-worn Channel 12 antennas still pointed toward Pembina.
Even though I’m still in my thirties, I’m old enough to remember the mid- to late ’80s when there were only five radio stations on the FM dial in Winnipeg: 92 CITI FM, Q-94, Kiss 97, CBC 98.3 and CKWG on 103.1.
Sometimes a fuzzy signal could be picked up from CFQX 92.9 in Selkirk until it bought a more powerful 100,000-watt transmitter and moved to 104.1 in the late ’80s, and most radios could pick up the audio portion of CBC Manitoba’s channel 6 television signal on 87.75. This only brought the total number of FM stations available up to seven.
Since the FM band wasn’t very cluttered and all of the stations except for CFQX had full-power transmitters, reception wasn’t much of a problem.
Since then, far more stations have jumped on the FM bandwagon. Some were started from scratch. Others were transplanted versions of existing or former AM stations such as CBC Radio One’s 89.3 FM signal (relaying their 990 AM signal), 102.3 Clear FM (the successor to 58 CKY) and 99.9 Bob FM (the successor to the venerable 630 CKRC).
Some stations might now have regrets about being on the FM dial.
Winnipeg’s FM dial is now clogged with more than 20 different signals, depending on how good a radio you use. Amid the cacophony, the high-powered stations still come in fairly well, but other stations are getting lost in the crowd.
The local stations that are suffering the most include Red River College’s 92.9 Kick FM, the University of Winnipeg’s 95.9 CKUW, possibly the University of Manitoba’s 101.5 CJUM, and volunteer-run nostalgia station 107.9 CJNU. Although licenced to serve Winnipeg, these stations were each untuneable on at least one of the three radios I tried to pick them up with from my home in south central Winnipeg.
It’s also possible that QX 104 might have a problem on its hands, as I can’t seem to get a tunable signal from them anymore on my alarm clock radio, even though they should theoretically come in loud and clear — and they do indeed come in well on two other radios (see below).
The inability for these stations to come in clearly on all types of radio is a serious impediment to their being able to reach both the early-morning-wakeup and the on-all-day-at-the-office crowds.
The chart below compares reception on my relatively cheap Nexxtech CD/Alarm Clock radio, an older Sony CFD-V17 radio/CD/cassette player, and a higher quality Sony ICF-SW7600GR radio.
Receivability of Winnipeg FM radio stations
The findings of this little experiment suggest that lower-powered stations like 92.9 Kick FM (250 watts) and CJUM (1,200 watts) lack the firepower to consistently be received clearly on the city’s FM radios, regardless of make or model. If they wish to cease to be lost in the cacophony of the Winnipeg FM dial, they need to find some way of putting out a better signal.
One way might be to gain access to a 100,000 watt transmitter and a taller broadcasting tower, which would provide these stations with the same firepower as Winnipeg’s better-known FM stations.
Running such a transmitter, however, might be more than just beyond their financial capacity: it might also lead to interference with other stations. For example, 92.9 Kick FM is required to operate at reduced power to avoid interference with 92.9 KKXL in Grand Forks.
The alternative is to consider a move to the AM dial. There are currently six unused AM frequencies in Winnipeg. An AM transmitter operating at as little as 1,000 watts would still be strong enough to cover Winnipeg with a passable signal — and some stations are so hard to receive on the FM dial that it would be nearly impossible for them to lose listeners by moving to AM anyway.
The unused AM frequencies are:
580 — Former home to 58 CKY. At the far left hand side of the dial, but can be used with a transmitter of up to 50,000 watts. Should have fairly good reach even at much lower power.
630 — Former home to CKRC. Abandoned since the mid-’90s. Maximum power 10,000 watts. On the low end of the dial, but probably doesn’t need a high-powered transmitter to get a signal out that covers the Winnipeg area.
750 — Assigned to Winnipeg, but never used or even applied for to my knowledge. Limited to a maximum power of 5,000 watts during the day and 2,500 watts at night, likely to avoid interference with 730 CKDM in Dauphin and 740 KVOX in Fargo. Well positioned to pick up listeners switching back and forth between CJOB on 680 and CBC Radio One on 990.
1120 — Assigned to Winnipeg but never used. Maximum power of 10,000 watts during the day, down to 4,000 watts at night. Still enough to cover the city with a fairly good signal. On the wrong side of the more heavily traveled 680-990 corridor, though.
1350 — Assigned to Winnipeg, but not used except perhaps in the distant past. Can be used to put out a high-powered signal if necessary — maximum of 50,000 watts by day, 10,000 watts by night. Faces limitations to prevent interference to a Grafton, N.D. station on 1340, and located at a place on the dial rarely visited by Winnipeg listeners.
1530 — Assigned to Winnipeg, but never used. Maximum power of 10,000 watts by day, 1,000 watts at night. Way up at the nosebleed end of the AM dial where few Winnipeggers ever go, unless they’re looking for CKMW 1570 from Morden-Winkler.
(Note: My ability to receive these stations might be influenced by both where I’m located in the city and the fact that I live above the ground clutter. If your reception of any of these stations is different, make a note of it in the comments section.)
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Portage and Main might be renowned as the windiest street corner in Canada. It could soon be the street corner most heavily bathed in electromagnetic radiation as well.
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