Patent ID: 6859489

Claim:
A method of determining a carrier frequency of base stations in a mobile receiver of a cellular mobile radio system working with W-CDMA, the method which comprises first searching for the carrier frequency of a primary synchronization channel and a time synchronization of the base stations by carrying out a non-coherent correlation of an in-phase component and quadrature component of a received signal with a primary synchronization code over a very large number of chips of the signal, searching for the primary synchronization channel in progressively less coarse frequency steps, by measuring an energy of the correlation result at intervals of a first frequency range in each case, then selecting a band having the highest energy and measuring at intervals of a second frequency range being smaller than the first frequency range in each case, then selecting a band having the highest energy and measuring at intervals of a third frequency range being smaller than the second frequency range in each case, and selecting a value having the highest energy as a hypothesis for the receiver carrier frequency.