MQ Series Channel

This is a bit specific to the MQ Series product, but I'll try anyway.
I have a job issued through the job scheduler which starts my MQ Series configuration each morning. On one machine (AS400), I've discovered that although the STRMQMCHL command is issued correctly the job which manages the start process fails because it can't connect to the 'other machine' (they're both AS400s by the way.) I think it's a timing issue. The important thing to note is that there are two jobs in the process. One is mine, and the other must be spawned by MQ (under user profile QMQM). It is the latter job which receives the message and fails to start the channel (I know this because I found the job log under the QMQM profile).

What I want to do is change my job to check whether the channel has started correctly in order to decide whether I should re-try the STRMQMCHL command again, after waiting for a little while (say 60 seconds). My problem is that I can't find a CL command which will do this. The PNGMQMCHL command only works if the channel has not yet started. I guess I could issue the command and if it fails, then I know the channel has started, but I thought there might be a simpler way of doing this to ensure that the configuration is established automatically.