Cool 94.5 broadcasts out of Wingham, a small town in Ontario's Huron County that most Canadians outside the area have never had a reason to think about, except that this particular town happens to have one of the deepest broadcasting histories of any place its size in the country. The station itself, call sign CIBU-FM, launched far more recently than that legacy, but it operates in the shadow of a Wingham institution that shaped how an entire genre sounded on Canadian radio.
From 94.5 The Bull to Cool 94.5
CIBU-FM went to air on April 1, 2005, after Blackburn Radio secured approval from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to launch a new FM signal in Wingham, following an earlier application the CRTC had turned down in 2003, according to the station's history on Wikipedia. It debuted as 94.5 The Bull, a hybrid Adult Rock format blending classic and new rock. That lineup narrowed in April 2014, when the station dropped new rock entirely and rebranded as Classic Rock 94.5, then shifted again on September 4, 2020, to a broader classic hits format under its current name, Cool 94.5. Blackburn Radio still owns the station today, running it out of a transmitter near Formosa at 75,000 watts, with a repeater, CIBU-FM-1, extending the signal to 91.7 in Bluewater.
Sharing a transmitter site with the birthplace of the CKNX Barn Dance
Cool 94.5 is co-located with sister stations CKNX AM and CKNX-FM, and that shared address connects it to one of the most storied chapters in Canadian radio. CKNX signed on in Wingham back in 1926 as an amateur experiment run by local businessman and fiddler W.T. "Doc" Cruickshank, formally licensed as a commercial station by 1935. Out of that station came the CKNX Barn Dance, a Saturday night program that ran from 1937 to 1963 and became, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the longest-running show of its kind in the country. Performers who passed through the Barn Dance early in their careers included Tommy Hunter and the Mercey Brothers, names that went on to define Canadian country music for a generation. The show was revived in 1996 and continues today under the Barn Dance Historical Society, which runs a museum in the town.
A small town still punching above its weight in radio
Wingham's own history helps explain why a town of a few thousand people ended up with this much broadcasting infrastructure. Surveyed in 1854 around the Maitland River and its early sawmills, the settlement grew fast once the London, Huron and Bruce Railway arrived in 1875, incorporating as a town by 1879 with a population of 2,000, according to background compiled by the Ontario Heritage Trust. That same growth-minded, self-sufficient streak that built a railway town in the middle of Huron County farmland is the same one that let a local fiddler turn an amateur radio experiment into a program that shaped Canadian country music, and it is the same infrastructure Cool 94.5 now uses to send classic hits across the same stretch of rural Ontario.