History
The station was launched by its original owners, Border Television at 8am on 14 April 1993 when managing director and breakfast show host John Myers played "The Best" by Tina Turner as its first song.
Originally CFM only broadcast from their Caldbeck mast to Carlisle on 96.4MHz and Penrith, from the top of Beacon Hill, on 102.5MHz. In September 1995, they also started transmitting to West Cumbria from their transmitters at Broughton Moor (102.2MHz) and Whitehaven (103.4MHz).
From its launch, the station broadcast from premises adjacent to the ITV Border studios in Durranhill, Carlisle. In April 2010, CFM moved to a new base at Atlantic House in Kingstown, Carlisle.
In 2005, Emap bought CFM and branded it as one of its Big City Network of stations. Three years later, Emap was bought by Bauer.
Previously, CFM has won numerous industry awards including the Radio Academy's North West Station of the Year 2005 and Emap Station of the Year 2006. In May 2013, CFM became the first radio station to broadcast from a nuclear reprocessing site at Sellafield, West Cumbria.
CFM was one of two stations within the Hits Radio Network that did not broadcast on DAB (the other being Radio Borders based in Galashiels). This was due to the lack of local DAB multiplexes in Cumbria. However, in May 2019, Ofcom announced plans to advertise three local multiplexes in Cumbria & South West Scotland. Bauer made the sole application to Ofcom to run the North & West Cumbria DAB Multiplex, stating that they planned to place CFM as well as other Bauer owned stations on it, alongside BBC Radio Cumbria. In December 2019, Ofcom confirmed that the multiplex licence would be awarded to Bauer Digital Radio, with the multiplex originally expected to begin transmission in late 2020. However, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this had been pushed back to 1 December 2021.
On 1 December 2021, the DAB Multiplex for North and West Cumbria was switched on (the subsequent multiplex for South Cumbria and North Lancashire owned by MuxCo was also switched on but does not carry the same stations as the Bauer owned one), and CFM along with a number of other Bauer owned radio stations as well as BBC Radio Cumbria began broadcasting for the first time on DAB in the area.
On 26th September 2024 it was announced that the Carlisle studios will be closing on Friday 27th September and the local afternoon show will end. Instead the station will take the National afternoon show as the Breakfast Show broadcast from Liverpool counts as a local show, this ends all locally broadcast programming on this station.
