When I signed up for DirecTV last November, there was an obscure channel I was looking forward to receiving called RFD TV. It's a channel intended for rural viewers, mainly farmers, but they can't prevent people in cities from watching it. (Well, I guess they could, by blocking it in "urban" ZIP codes, but they don't.) The attraction here is that they have a fair amount of train-related programming.

When I had my DirecTV service installed, there was a problem. Although most DirecTV programming is delivered by satellites at 101 degrees west longitude, some programming comes from 110, and some comes from 119. RFD was coming from 119, and it turned out that because of the placement of a certain tree in my apartment complex's courtyard, I can only receive programming from 101.

DirecTV is smart enough to know that I can't get programming from 110 and 119, so my program guide doesn't even list the channels on those satellites. That's why I was surprised when I checked the "WishLists" on my DirecTV/TiVo receiver, and the "train" WishList was being matched by something on RFD.

It turns out that DirecTV launched a new satellite into the 119 position last month, and it's about to go active. That satellite is designed to carry local channels for a bunch of areas of the U.S. While waiting for the new 119 satellite to launch, they'd temporarily put some of those local channels on a satellite at 101. Now that they can move those channels, that opened up some space on 101, so they moved RFD and a few other channels from 119 to 101.

Now, if only I didn't have to wait three days to see any train-related programming on RFD. I just turned it on, and they were talking about soybean futures.