Patent ID: 8478218

Claim:
A scan system operative to receive signals within a band from an antenna comprising: a tuner operative to tune to two or more sub-bands within the band and operative to generate a tuned analog signal; an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) coupled to the tuner and operative to convert the tuned analog signal to a digital signal; an on-channel selection block responsive to the digital signal and operable to: select only the on-channel frequencies and to substantially disregard out-of-channel frequencies from the received signal, generate a first figure of merit (FOM) of an on-channel signal representing a measurement of the signal quality of the on-channel signal; an out-of-channel selection block responsive to the digital signal and operable to select only the out-of-channel frequencies and to substantially disregard the on-channel frequencies from the received signal and operable to: generate a second FOM of out-of-channel signal representing a measurement of the signal quality of the out-of-channel signal; and a finite state machine (FSM) responsive to the first FOM on-channel signal and the second FOM out-of-channel signal and operable to: record the first FOM from the on-channel selection block and the second out-of-channel selection block, perform an initial sub-band scan by comparing an initial FOM of each of the channels within an initial sub-band of the two or more sub-bands to determine a candidate channel based on the channel with the lowest FOM, the candidate channel subsequently used as a measure of comparison to channels of sub-bands other than the initial sub-band to identify and maintain a “best” channel.