A dynamic spectrum management (DSM) engine may determine the channel quality of one or more channels associated with the DSM engine when packets are not being transmitted over the channels. For example, the DSM engine may trigger a channel quality measurement on a non-primary channel on a condition that a predetermined period of time has lapsed since the last activity associated with the non-primary channel. Channel quality measurement may be triggered via a data sending event on the non-primary channel such as sending a data frame on the non-primary channel. The DSM engine may perform respective quality measurements on multiple channels and store the respective quality values in a database. Time-averaged channel qualities for the channels may be computed based on the stored quality values for computing transmit power distribution of across the channels.