City Gatineau, Quebec Frequency 94.9 MHz (FM) | Branding 94,9 Rouge FM First air date January 1, 1970 | |
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Broadcast area National Capital Region
Eastern Ontario, Outaouais Slogan Toute la musique, une couleur | ||
CIMF-FM is a French-language Canadian radio station located in Gatineau, Quebec, near Ottawa, Ontario.
Owned and operated by Bell Media, it broadcasts on 94.9 MHz with an effective radiated power of 84,000 watts (class C1) using an omnidirectional antenna located in Camp Fortune. Its current offices are located in Gatineau at 215 Boulevard Saint-Joseph in the same building as CKTF-FM for the NRJ radio group.
The station has an adult contemporary format and is part of the Rouge FM network which operates across Quebec and Eastern Ontario. It started operations with a beautiful music format as a sister station to the now-defunct CKCH 970, which closed on September 30, 1994 when the Telemedia and Radiomutuel networks merged to form the Radiomédia network (now Corus Québec).
Up until 1990, CIMF-FM had a beautiful music format. The station switched to adult contemporary music in 1990 and the station was renamed "CIMF Rock-Détente".
On October 31, 2000, Télémédia Radio was denied a licence to add a new FM transmitter to operate on 107.7 MHz at Hawkesbury, Ontario.
In 2004, Astral Media revamped the Rock Détente network with a new logo. This resulted in "CIMF Rock-Détente" being renamed to simply "94,9 RockDétente". As such, the station no longer publicly uses its callsign (although the callsign was resurrected as station identification in 2011).
Since 2001, the station also operates a relay in Hawkesbury, Ontario, approximately 100 kilometres east of Ottawa/Gatineau. This results from a deal between Telemedia (which then owned CIMF-FM) and Radio-Canada to allow the latter to raise the power of CBF-FM 95.1 MHz in Montreal, Quebec from 17,030 to 100,000 watts. The relay, CIMF-FM-1, operates on 88.9 MHz using a directional antenna with an average effective radiated power of 759 watts and a peak effective radiated power of 1,250 watts (class A).
On August 18, 2011, at 4:00 p.m. EDT, the station ended its longtime 21-year run with the RockDétente branding. All RockDétente stations, including CITE-FM, rebranded as Rouge FM. The last song under the RockDétente branding was Pour que tu m'aimes encore by Celine Dion, followed by a tribute of the branding. The first song under Rouge FM was I Gotta Feeling by Black Eyed Peas.