About Ondas FM

Ondas FM

Overview

Ondas FM is a Spanish-language radio brand and programme producer based in Toronto, Ontario. It presents itself online as "Hispanic Radio Station | OndasFM | Toronto," under the slogan "Más que una radio" — more than a radio. Ondas FM is not a licensed broadcaster in its own right: it holds no CRTC licence and no frequency of its own. Instead, it produces Spanish-language programming that Toronto listeners hear on the FM dial at 91.9 and 100.7 — frequencies shown in its own logo and team materials — alongside a live internet stream and a large video archive. Its flagship programme is 20 Minutos, a weekday news broadcast hosted by Diana Lora, and its output mixes news, talk and community events coverage aimed at the Spanish-speaking population of the Greater Toronto Area. The service is verifiably active in 2026: its website carried news posts dated August 2026, and its home page was updated in September 2026 to promote a community event, as detailed in the Digital Presence section below.

History

Ondas FM's documented public history is comparatively recent and largely digital. The fullest independent account is a June 2022 report in Toronto Hispano, the city's Spanish-language community press, which identified the operation behind Ondas FM as 1Media Ltd, led by chief executive Eric Sifuentes, and described its programmes airing on CHIN-FM 100.7 and CHIN-1-FM 91.9, the two Toronto FM signals of CHIN Radio. A January 2024 post on Ondas FM's own site documents its weekday news programme in an early-evening slot on 100.7 FM, and the site's footer carries a 2023 copyright line. The station does not publish a founding date, and none is asserted in this profile.

The arrangement reported in 2022 places Ondas FM inside a long Toronto tradition. CHIN, founded by broadcaster Johnny Lombardi, began multilingual broadcasting on AM in 1966 and added CHIN-FM 100.7 in 1967; its schedules have always been built from blocks of programming in many languages, produced by what Lombardi called associate producers — independent community producers who made their own programmes for the station's licensed signals, a model he described in detail in CRTC proceedings. CHIN-1-FM 91.9 carries a separate ethnic schedule of its own. Ondas FM belongs to that brokered-programming tradition, updated for a streaming era: a Spanish-language production house whose programmes reach the FM dial through a licensed multicultural broadcaster, and reach everyone else through the internet.

Programming and Content

The centrepiece of the Ondas FM schedule is 20 Minutos, a compact weekday news programme presented by Diana Lora, who is listed on the station's team page as both producer and host. A January 2024 post on the station's site placed the programme Monday to Friday from 6:10 to 6:30 p.m. on 100.7 FM; that slot is recorded here as it was published at the time, since the station does not currently post a full programme grid. The news agenda visible in the station's recent output is heavily Canadian and political: its video posts from late September and early October 2025, authored mainly by Arturo Bolívar, covered a parliamentary clash between Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre over unemployment and the deficit, renewed trade rhetoric from Donald Trump directed at Canada, and an American plan to end the war in Gaza. News posts on the site continued through February and August 2026.

Around the newscast, the station's shows page presents its other programmes through a YouTube gallery: Q'Onda!, a general entertainment and talk title; the GoldBear Report; Hola Toronto, a community-magazine name with a long history in Toronto Hispanic media; and A Primera Hora, a morning-format title promoted on the home page. Events are part of the output as well as the business: the station maintains an events function on its team, and in September 2026 its home page promoted a late-September community cruise under its own branding.

Audience and Reach

Ondas FM addresses one of the largest language communities in the country. Statistics Canada's analysis of the 2021 Census found that Spanish, with some 1.2 million speakers, was the language other than English or French with the most speakers in Canada, and census promotional material counted about 317,000 people who speak Spanish predominantly at home. The Toronto area holds the country's largest concentration of that audience — industry analyses of the 2021 data put roughly a quarter of all Latin Americans in Canada, about 26.5 percent, in the Toronto area. That is the audience Ondas FM's mix of Canadian news, homeland coverage and community information is built to serve, in the first language of a largely immigrant listenership.

The station's own claims about its standing should be read as its own billing rather than verified measurement. Its YouTube channel describes Ondas FM as the "#1 FM Spanish radio in Toronto," and its channel page displays roughly 31,000 subscribers and some 9,000 videos; its advertising page calls it the first and oldest Spanish-language radio producer in Canada. No independent ratings for the station are published, and none of these superlatives is asserted as fact here. What can be said on the evidence is that the service maintains an unusually deep video archive for a community producer, an updated news feed, and a live stream — the working footprint of an active operation rather than a dormant brand.

Digital Presence

Ondas FM's home online is ondasfm.ca, a Spanish-language site with news, shows, events, team and advertising pages, and a Radio.co live-audio player embedded throughout, so the stream is one click from any page. Its video output lives on its YouTube channel, which functions as the station's programme archive and is where its shows are presented. The site is candidly a mixed picture, and this profile records it as found: the news feed is current, with posts dated 31 August 2026 and 5 February 2026 (the site omits the year on current-year posts), and the home page was refreshed around 19 September 2026 to promote a 26 September 2026 event. Against that, the home page's "Señal en Vivo" video embed returned an error when checked in October 2026, some static pages date from 2023, and there is no published programme schedule grid anywhere on the site — listeners learn slots from programme posts and promotions rather than from a timetable.

Ownership and Organisation

Ondas FM is a programming brand and production operation, not a licensee: the CRTC licences for the FM signals its programmes use belong to their respective broadcasters, and Ondas FM itself holds none. Reporting in Toronto Hispano in June 2022 identified the operator as 1Media Ltd and its chief executive as Eric Sifuentes. Two qualifications belong with that attribution: the station's own website, checked in October 2026, does not name 1Media Ltd or CHIN Radio in its text, so the corporate arrangement rests on that reporting; and the 91.9 and 100.7 frequencies its programmes are associated with are CHIN Radio's signals, as the 2022 reporting describes. The current team page on the station's site lists Eric Sifuentes as chief executive officer; Diana Lora as producer and host; Fabián Merlo as principal host; Celia Urbalejo as co-host; Zulay Rincón in public relations; and Esther Mijares responsible for events. Arturo Bolívar is the byline on most of the site's recent news posts.

Contact and Availability

Listeners can hear Ondas FM through the live player on its website, ondasfm.ca, through its YouTube channel, and — as its branding and the 2022 reporting describe — on Toronto's 91.9 and 100.7 FM signals, where Spanish-language blocks including the 20 Minutos newscast have aired. The station publishes its contact details in its site footer: email info@ondasfm.ca and telephone +1 (416) 700-8889. In keeping with this directory's practice, the listing's structured business email field is left empty; the address above is the one the station itself publishes for general contact.