City Hamilton, Ontario Slogan More Music Variety First air date 1986 | Branding 102.9 K-Lite Frequency 102.9 MHz (FM) | |
Broadcast area Hamilton/Burlington, Ontario | ||
CKLH-FM is a Canadian radio station, broadcasting at 102.9 FM in Hamilton, Ontario. The station broadcasts an adult contemporary format branded as 102-9 K-Lite. The station is currently owned by Bell Media. CKLH's studios are located on Upper Wentworth Street in Hamilton, while its transmitter is located atop the Niagara Escarpment near Burlington.
The station received CRTC approval on May 8, 1986 and was launched on October 7, 1986 by Armadale Communications, the owner of CKOC. The LH in the call sign stood for Les Horton, CKOC's first broadcast engineer.
Armadale sold the stations to London Communications in 1993. London Communications subsequently sold them to Telemedia in 1999, and Telemedia was itself acquired by Standard Broadcasting in 2002. In October 2007, Astral Media acquired Standard Broadcasting's terrestrial radio and television assets, including CKLH. Shortly after Astral acquired the station, CKLH-FM adopted a more adult top 40 format; this ended in November 2009 when the station returned to its adult contemporary status after Boxing Day 2009, and regarding the flip from adult contemporary to adult hits at then-sister CJEZ in Toronto, which became CHBM after that.
As of 2016, CKLH begins playing Christmas music beginning in the last week of November up until Boxing Day. Sister station CHRE-FM in St. Catharines (also with an adult contemporary format using the EZ Rock brand) also begins playing Christmas music around the same time. Most recently, CKLH has begun to skew towards a younger-leaning direction, like its EZ Rock sisters owned that were owned by Astral (now owned by Bell Media). Even though the station added more adult top 40 songs, they remain adult contemporary due to the fact this station was the only AC owned by Astral Media in the GTA because of sister station CHRE-FM being blocked by CHRY-FM due to adjacent channel interference. In addition, it still reports on Mediabase and Nielsen BDS panels as a Canadian AC station. Most of the classic hits were moved to sister oldies station CKOC and then-sister adult hits station CHBM-FM.
Even though CKLH-FM is the only AC station in Hamilton, other nearby AC stations are Toronto's CHFI, St. Catharines' CHRE (also owned by Bell), Kitchener's CHYM and Brantford's CKPC. Currently, only Vancouver's (CHQM-FM), Calgary's (CHFM-FM), (which shifted to Adult top 40) Edmonton's (CKEA-FM) (which has shifted to Classic hits) and Winnipeg's (CKY-FM) are served by only one AC station in terms of top-10 Canadian markets.
With the merger of Astral Media and Bell Media, CKLH became a Bell Media owned station on July 5, 2013.