City Ottawa, Ontario Slogan Totally Ottawa First air date 1924 | Branding CBC Radio One Frequency 91.5 MHz (FM) | |
Broadcast area National Capital Region
(Eastern Ontario, Western Quebec, Upstate New York) | ||
CBO-FM is a Canadian radio station. It is the CBC Radio One station in Ottawa, airing at 91.5 FM, and serves much of Eastern Ontario through a network of relay transmitters. CBO-FM's Ottawa-area transmitter is located in Camp Fortune, Quebec, while its studios are located in the CBC Ottawa Broadcast Centre on Sparks Street.
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History
CNRO was launched on February 27, 1924 as CKCH a Canadian National Railway radio network station, and adopted the CNRO call sign on July 16, 1924, in order to indicate its network affiliation. The station was the first to broadcast the time signal from the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa, doing so daily at 9 pm. It operated on AM 690 and later switched to 600. In 1933, the station was taken over by the CBC's predecessor, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission and became CRCO on 880 kHz AM. The call sign changed to CBO in 1937 when ownership was transferred to the CBC. Later frequency changes to 910 in 1941 and to 920 in 1977 (the latter accompanied by a power boost to 50,000 watts) were followed by a move from the AM to the FM band at 91.5 in 1991. The call sign of the existing CBO-FM station on 103.3 (part of the CBC Stereo network) was then changed to CBOQ-FM. From 1924, the station's studios were located on the sixth floor of the Chateau Laurier Hotel in downtown Ottawa, a legacy of its origins with the Canadian National Railway which had also owned the hotel. In 2004, the station left the Chateau Laurier, closing the oldest operating radio studios in Canada, and moved to the new CBC Ottawa Broadcast Centre on Sparks Street as part of a consolidation of various Ottawa CBC facilities.
Local programming
The station's local programs are Ottawa Morning in the mornings and All in a Day in the afternoon. However, most of the relay transmitters air the Toronto-originated Ontario Morning in place of Ottawa Morning. Unlike most CBC Radio One stations, which air provincewide morning programs on Saturdays and Sundays, the station also produces its own Saturday morning show, In Town and Out.
In addition, CBO produces the regional noon news and talk program Ontario Today, which airs on all CBC Radio One stations in Ontario including Toronto, and the national network program, The House. It also formerly produced Bandwidth, a music show which aired on all CBC Radio One stations in Ontario outside of Toronto until 2014.
Transmitters
On July 5, 2010, the CBC applied to change Brockville's CBOB-FM frequency from 106.5 to 91.9 MHz which received CRTC approval on November 10, 2010.
On June 2, 2014, the CBC submitted an application to convert CBLI Deep River from the AM band (1110 kHz) to the FM band at 97.9 MHz. This application was approved on September 30, 2014. Deep River's callsign for its new transmitter will be CBCD-FM-1.
CBOM 710 in Maniwaki, Quebec is CBO-FM's only rebroadcaster outside Ontario and currently one of the last remaining AM transmitters to rebroadcast CBO-FM.