CHKT

CHKT is a Canadian radio station, airing at 1430 AM in Toronto, Ontario. The station, owned by the Fairchild Radio service, airs Chinese language programming. CHKT's transmitters are located on the Toronto Islands.

History

The station that was the indirect forerunner of CHKT first aired in 1925 as AM 840 CKCL, owned by the Dominion Battery company. As with many radio stations in the early years of radio broadcasting, the station changed frequencies a number of times in its first years of operation. It settled on the permanent 580 kilocycles (now kilohertz) frequency in 1931.

In 1945, the station was sold to Jack Kent Cooke's Toronto Broadcasting Co., and adopted the callsign CKEY. It was subsequently acquired by Shoreacres Broadcasting, a consortium that included Westinghouse and The Globe and Mail, in 1961, and changed its frequency to 590 in 1964 as CKWW signed on at 580 that year in Windsor and CKAR, (known today as CFBK-FM), Huntsville, Ontario had to change its frequency from 590 to 630 kHz.