Abstract: A method is disclosed that a Mobile Station MS performs at switch-on to search the most favorable target cell in UMTS systems like the 3GPP CDMA—LCR (Low Chip Rate) option at 1.28 Mcps—TDD (Time Division Duplex) mode and the equivalent TD-SCDMA (Time Division—Synchronous CDMA). Signal at the MS antenna is the sum of different RF downlink frames coming from different carriers in the assigned frequency ranges. A DL synchronization timeslot and a BCCH TS0 are both transmitted with full power in the frames, the first one includes one out of 32 SYNC codes assigned on cell basis. Following a conventional approach the absence of a common downlink pilot and without prior knowledge of the used frequencies would force the MS, for all the frequencies of the channel raster stored in the SIM card, the correlation of the received frame with all the 32 SYNCs stored in the MS, in order to detect the BSIC of a cell to which associate the power measures.