I suspect all this channel shuffling on 82 is for similar reasons to what happened on 91 a couple of weeks ago. They've got 4 satellites up there, two at 82 and two at 91. For reasons best known only to BEV, they are running a rag-tag fleet consisting of two hand-me-down DirecTV birds and two originals. At 91, all was well until a power supply/solar panel failure caused a significant drop in output power. At first, they simply reduced power to all 32 transponders. But outage reports started to pour in from subcribers near the edge of the footprint and others experiencing adverse weather conditions. So they brought in an "understudy" cast-off satellite from DirecTV, named it Nimiq 3 and re-aimed it at central Canada. Initially, they lit up transponders 3, 7, 9, 11, 17, 21, 23 and 25 on it. Signals from those virtually disappeared in the extreme southeast and southwest US.
Last month, their frugality caught up with them when Nimiq 3 ran out of fuel. They then moved in another cast-off DirecTV bird in, and again for reasons known only to them, flip-flopped the transponders listed above with 4, 8, 10, 12, 18, 22, 24 and 26 with Nimiq 1.
As far as the changes happening on 82, I doubt that anyone at BEV with knowledge of what they are really up to on will come on here and explain. The official statements call it "necessary maintenance", and that's about all we can expect to get. And good luck trying to get accurate footprint maps of the temporary satellites.
