Patent ID: 8270548

Claim:
A method for a terminal of a cellular telecommunication system for determining system information about a node of a network of the telecommunication system, the telecommunication system enabling determination of the system information by the terminal from information transmitted from at least one cell operated by the node, where the telecommunication system employs Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access, the method comprising the steps of: receiving a transmission signal, comprising reference symbols and synchronization symbols, from a network node of the at least one cell; estimating, for each of a plurality of transmit antennas of the network node, a preliminary channel estimate based on the received reference symbols; estimating a pre-coding vector, being associated with transmission by at least one of said antennas of the network node of the at least one cell, for the synchronization symbols; and, estimating a lower bound on the number of transmit antennas used by the network node by determining the highest index of non-zero elements of the pre-coding vector to be the lower bound.