Patent ID: 8170618

Claim:
A method of operating a wireless communication device, comprising: operating the wireless communication device in a M by N multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) mode, wherein M is a number of antennas transmitting to the communication device from a first base station, and wherein N a number of receiving antennas and receivers, and wherein M is an integer greater than zero and N is an integer greater than one; operating the wireless communication device in an M by N−1 MIMO mode while a first one of the N receiving antennas and a first one of the N receivers receives wireless communication from a second base station; operating the wireless communication device in a MIMO mode wherein a data stream is split into multiple lower rate data streams and each data stream is transmitted from a different transmit antenna in the same frequency channel; and operating the wireless communication device in a space-time coding MIMO mode while scanning for the second base station.