St. Thomas Again Has a Radio Station

[jon]

NEW ST. THOMAS STATION - ON AIR
Press Release
May 20, 2011

May 14, 1948 CHLO AM 680 went on the air & remained an AM station but moved up the dial to AM 1570 in 1970. Then on July 8th 1994, CHLO went to the FM band at 103.1 and morphed into a London radio station. St. Thomas was left without local radio.

MY BROADCASTING CORP. is pleased to announce that today at noon, LOCAL radio returned to St. Thomas at 94.1 FM. The all-new 94.1 myFM is currently playing 5000 songs in a row and will soon feature LOCAL news and events for St. Thomas for years to come.

CKZM-FM is the latest addition to the myFM group of stations serving communities throughout Ontario. Later this summer, listen for the launch of 99.9 FM in Gananoque, Ontario.

[jon]

The web site has a temporary URL right now, so best to go here instead and click on the red brick building labelled "94.1 St. Thomas":
http://www.myfmradio.ca/

Radio in St. Thomas has a great history. Especially CHLO-AM. It had a strong reputation as a Top 40 station, and many well known CHUM announcers came out of there, including Hal Weaver. CHLO was also one of the stations paid by Ted Rogers to move off 680 KHz so that (what became) CFTR could be a viable, powerful radio station in Greater Toronto.

Personally, I heard CHLO from Vancouver shortly after they made the move from 680 to 1570. Less than a year ago, I looked at the verification letter I received from the station back in 1970. And was amazed to find that it was a personally written letter from the owner, John L. Moore, happy to hear that I could hear the station with 250,000 watt XERF on the air at the same time. His son, Steve Moore, who is currently Music Director at Capital-FM in Edmonton, really enjoyed seeing his father's signature after all these years.

[Buckley]

I imagine this station should do quite well, the people of St. Thomas have to be annoyed with essentially living in the shadow of London. I'm sure if someone has their way the city will just eventually annex it as it has other small surrounding communities over the years, but the London stations don't serve St. Thomas very well if at all.