How do you set/change the channel? If you do it by giving tcpdump an argument, then I suspect you're out of luck. You'll just have to stop the process and restart it with the new channel setting. If the channel can be changed with some other utility while tcpdump is running, then it should be fairly simple: read from the pipe until you want to change it (maybe based on how much time has elapsed since you started), and then run the other utility, then continue reading from the pipe. There may be some buffered output from tcpdump already waiting at the moment you change the channel. If that's a problem, you may have to do something more fancy.