CKWX

CKWX was shut down on July 8, 2026 after a century of operations with the same call letters. This station had been operating for so long that not only did my grandparents have fond memories of it, but my parents as well. After it converted to all-news station News1130 in 1996, it was something that I listened to frequently to get updates about news, weather, sports, and of course the dreaded Vancouver traffic.

Often forgotten is that CKWX was a clear-channel station, meaning it could often be heard as far away as Russia. By returning the CKWX call letters to the CRTC, Rogers was not only ending an era of Vancouver broadcasting, but worldwide broadcasting as well.

There are plenty of other sites out there that have extensive information about CKWX’s history, so I won’t get into that here. Instead, I’d like to focus on the impressive precision of operations at the station while it was News1130. Operating a live 24-hour newsroom wasn’t easy nor cheap, and the fact that Vancouver had such a thing is remarkable.

News1130 would always broadcast a tone at exactly the top and bottom of each hour in a manner similar to time-keeping stations such as WWV and WWVH. This tone wasn’t just helpful for listeners setting the time, it was a schedule-keeping marker for the staff to follow.

The tone would play over whatever was on the air (be it an ad, special report, live speech, etc), meaning that if the newscast was behind schedule, everyone (including the listeners) would know. It was an impressive dedication to professionalism and accountability.

Bottom of hour newscast, inclusive of tone, September 27, 2002 8:30am.

I found it fascinating to listen to the odd time the schedule would get out of whack by a few minutes, and then the staff’s efforts to catch the schedule back up to the next tone. All done live while the public was listening; impressive stuff.

At some point late in the station’s life, the tone was eliminated, which makes finding recordings of it somewhat difficult. If you have any old recordings of the TOH or BOH tone and the subsequent headlines, please send them my way!

Meanwhile, a public service is gone. It’s true that AM radio is dying a slow, unprofitable death, and that running a 24-hour newsroom is perhaps one of the most expensive radio formats to operate. But this was a real service that real people in Vancouver relied on. Its shortwave re-broadcasts and status as a clear-channel station ensured untold numbers around the world could receive news broadcasts wherever they were. The fact that the call letters operated for over a century is just icing on the soon to be forgotten cake.

Of course, once you remember that the decision to shut the station down was made by the same company that managed to take its entire ASN offline all at once, things start to make a little more sense.