About CFMU 93.3

CFMU 93.3

CFMU 93.3 FM is a campus and community radio station in Hamilton, Ontario, owned and operated by the McMaster Students Union at McMaster University. The station's call letters stand for McMaster University, and it has served the campus and the wider Hamilton area with student- and volunteer-produced programming since it first went on the air on January 13, 1978.

Overview

CFMU broadcasts a campus-radio format: non-commercial, volunteer-driven programming spanning music genres, spoken word, news, and multicultural content. The station is licensed by the CRTC and operates as a Class A1 station with an effective radiated power of 166 watts average (250 watts peak), with its signal reaching much of Hamilton and neighbouring Burlington. It is governed as a service of the McMaster Students Union, the student government of McMaster University, and its day-to-day operations involve student staff and community volunteers.

Wikipedia lists cfmu.ca as the station's website, where listeners can also stream the station live. The McMaster University Athletics department describes CFMU as a fixture on campus and in the Hamilton community, providing a platform for student voices, diverse programming, and local storytelling.

History

CFMU's roots go back to the late 1960s, when it began as a project of the McMaster Radio Club operating as a closed-circuit AM station under the auspices of the Board of Student Broadcasting. In 1976 the station applied to the CRTC for its first FM licence, seeking 107.9 MHz, but the application was denied in favour of a broadcaster in Burlington.

CFMU eventually launched on FM on January 13, 1978, broadcasting in mono at 50 watts. It was the third college radio station to launch in Canada, after CFRC at Queen's University and CJRT, which had been started by the Ryerson Institute of Technology (now Toronto Metropolitan University). The station began with a Wilkinson transmitter and a two-bay circularly polarized Phelps Dodge antenna.

The 1980s and 1990s brought technical evolution. In 1985 CFMU successfully petitioned to move its transmitter from downtown Hamilton to the top of the Niagara Escarpment, near Chedoke Hospital, improving its reach. In 1991, faced with a wattage increase at nearby CFRU-FM in Guelph, CFMU upgraded from 50 watts to a 250-watt stereo transmitter. In 2000 the station decreased to a 166-watt station and began sharing a tower at Mohawk College with that college's instructional station CIOI-FM, an arrangement that continues to define its technical footprint. Because its signal uses vertical polarization only, CFMU can be heard farther on car radios, and it is audible throughout much of Hamilton and Burlington.

Programming

As a campus-community station, CFMU's schedule is built around volunteer-produced shows. Programming includes music across many genres, multicultural and multilingual content, spoken-word and talk programming, and coverage of campus and community issues. The station positions itself as a training ground for student broadcasters and a home for voices and sounds underserved by commercial radio.

Sports programming has grown in prominence. In August 2025, McMaster Athletics & Recreation announced a partnership with 93.3 CFMU to carry live audio broadcasts of all Marauder home football games during the 2025 season, on 93.3 FM and via CFMU's online stream. The announcement quoted Program Director Jamie Tennant, who noted CFMU's long history with Marauder football and the station's excitement about bringing games to McMaster students, alumni, and football fans across Hamilton. The broadcast team of Matthew Davison (play-by-play) and Andrew Barlett (colour commentary) was set to call the action from Ron Joyce Stadium, with the home schedule opening August 30 against the Queen's Gaels.

The partnership also reflected CFMU's increased commitment to sports coverage more broadly, broadening the scope of its programming while giving fans another way to engage with Marauder Athletics. It followed the 2024 closure of commercial station CHML, after which Marauders football broadcasts moved to CFMU — a shift that underscored the station's role as a locally rooted broadcaster in a changing Hamilton radio market.

Surviving the Student Choice Initiative

CFMU's student-union ownership was stress-tested in 2019 by the Ontario government's Student Choice Initiative, which allowed university students to opt out of fees deemed non-essential. As McMaster's student newspaper The Silhouette reported that September, "September 2019 marked the first of possibly many registration periods in which students could opt-out of student union fees deemed non-essential" — a change instituted in January 2019 as part of the widely criticized initiative. CFMU's levy was $13.72 per student; student groups across the province feared the worst, and campus stations elsewhere were hit hard — CJAM at the University of Windsor cut staff, and Laurentian's CKLU saw its student-fee funding collapse from $45,670 in 2018 to $3,000 in 2019.

CFMU weathered the crisis — a testament to the depth of its campus support and to the value students placed on a station that had, as Marauders communications staff put it, been "part of the soundtrack of McMaster since 1963." (McMaster Athletics traces the station's lineage to 1963, when the McMaster Radio Club's closed-circuit AM operation began; the FM sign-on followed in 1978.) The episode underlined the structural vulnerability of the campus-radio model in Ontario — and the resilience of a station whose listeners were willing to keep paying for it voluntarily.

A Training Ground for Broadcasters

Campus radio's deeper value is as an incubator, and CFMU is part of that national story. A federal broadcasting-policy appendix cataloguing campus radio as a "cultural incubator" lists CFMU among the stations where audiovisual professionals — such as Phil Bergmann — volunteered before moving into professional media careers. That pipeline function is built into the station's design: volunteer-produced shows across music, multicultural, and spoken-word programming give students hands-on experience in production, hosting, and station management, while the 2025 Marauder football broadcasts and the expanded sports coverage have added live play-by-play to the training repertoire.

It is a model that has now run for nearly half a century at McMaster: students arrive, learn the craft on a real transmitter reaching across Hamilton and Burlington, and leave — while the station itself endures, governed by the student union that built it.

Coverage & Audience

CFMU's broadcast area is the City of Hamilton, with its signal audible through much of Hamilton and into Burlington. Its core audience is the McMaster campus community — students, faculty, and staff — together with community listeners drawn to its non-commercial, eclectic programming. The station does not publish measured audience figures. Its online stream extends its reach to alumni and listeners beyond the terrestrial signal.

Ownership

CFMU-FM is owned and operated by the McMaster Students Union, the student government at McMaster University. It is licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission as a campus radio station. The station's history has been shaped at several turns by CRTC decisions, from its denied 1976 application for 107.9 MHz to its transmitter moves and power changes.

Digital Presence

The station streams live online at the website listed in its Wikipedia entry, cfmu.ca, which also hosts episode archives and program information. CFMU maintains an active presence as a campus media institution: McMaster Athletics promotes its broadcasts, and the station's shows circulate through podcast platforms as well. For a station that began in the late 1960s as a closed-circuit AM project of the McMaster Radio Club, the move to FM in 1978 and then to online streaming represents a continuous adaptation — from a campus-only signal to a station audible across Hamilton and on the internet, while remaining governed by and for the student community that created it.