and data structures do not need to match the compartmental arrangement depicted in fig7 much of the present invention ue 100 is similar to the prior art ue 30 in particular the ue 100 includes a transceiver 101 a stage 1 110 and a stage 3 130 that are equivalent to the prior art ue 30 the ue 100 further includes a stage 2 120 that performs the present invention frame synchronization and cell search method please refer to fig8 illustrating components of the stage 2 120 the stage 2 120 comprises a plurality of correlators 130 a combiner 140 and a selection unit 150 the plurality of correlators 130 includes a correlator 132 responsive to the psch slot synchronization signal and correlators 134 a p responsive to 16 secondary frame synchronization codes ssc the stage 1 110 output signal 122 is input to the correlators 132 134 a p and each correlator 132 134 a p outputs a correlation result to the combiner 140 the combiner 140 includes an simple average sa processor 142 for averaging output from the correlator 132 a decision logic 145 a complex conjugate processor 144 for taking the complex conjugate of output of the decision logic 145 and a plurality of multipliers 146 for coherently combining the frame synchronization correlation results of the correlators 134 a p with an estimated phase from the correlator 132 result specifically the sa processor 142 and complex conjugate processor 144 receive and process output of the correlator 132 as limited by the decision logic 145 then forward the processed output to each of the multipliers 146 the processing performed.