Abstract: A rake receiver includes impulse response measurement means and path allocation means for allocating paths to rake fingers in dependence on the output of the impulse response measurement means, wherein the path allocating means is configured to compare the magnitudes of pairs of peaks, represented in the output of the impulse response measurement means, and ignore the lesser member of a pair for the allocation of paths to rake fingers, if the magnitudes of the pair differ in a predetermined manner so as to exclude spurious paths, the pairs having peaks temporally separated by a period characteristic of the separation of main and side lobes of filters for producing the baseband pulse shape expected by the receiver are used for the allocation of the paths to the rake fingers.

Abstract: A DSP subsystem (3) implements four conventional rake fingers (21a, 21b, 21c, 21d), a conventional impulse response measurement process (22) and a delay selection process (23). A received signal is supplied to the impulse response measurement process (22), which outputs up to eight delay and magnitude values notionally corresponding to different paths. Each delay and magnitude value pair relates to one peak in the impulse response of the input signal. The output of the impulse response measurement process (22) is then processed by the delay selection process (23) to select the four best paths. The delay selection process (23) calculates the temporal distances between the delays output by the impulse measurement process. If any peaks are temporally separated by a period characteristic of the separation of main and side lobes of filters for producing the baseband pulse shape expected by the receiver (in the embodiment 1.