810 AM The plan for a multilingual AM radio station in Winnipeg was started in 1974 by Casimir Stanczykowski. CKJS
810 AM first
signed on the air on March 25, 1975. It was Stanczykowski's second radio station, behind
Montreal's multicultural station
CFMB. In the 1980's it also boasted, for a very short time, a cutting edge
alternative music program called
Nightbeat. This program was responsible for promoting local talent and giving airplay to music that wasn't being played on mainstream radio. It was unusual for Modern Rock and other alternative music to be heard on commercial radio in this era. In 2006, the station was sold to
Newcap Broadcasting. The deal was approved on October 24, 2011. In November 2014, Evanov announced that it would acquire CFMB, which re-united both of Stanczykowski's stations under common ownership. On September 21, 2021, CKJS began simulcasting on its new FM frequency, and in
HD Radio—the first station in Manitoba to do so. CJKS's AM signal continued operations until February 21, 2022, after which it was shut down—completing its transition to FM. 92.7 is a first adjacent frequency of 92.9 that was formerly used by
CKIC-FM which left the air in 2012. Gill Broadcasting applied to use CKIC's former 92.9 frequency in Winnipeg for a new ethnic/multilingual radio station that was denied by the CRTC in 2015 but was later used by CKYZ-FM a low-power 50 watt
tourist information station owned by Gill Broadcasting without a CRTC license until it moved to 96.9 MHz in 2018 after Evanov received approval from the CRTC to convert CKJS to the FM band at 92.7 MHz in 2017. ==References==