thus does little to reduce fading effects on the forward link moreover the reverse link component chain in bs 100 is susceptible to signal noise contributions inherent in such configurations as will be described in greater detail below a bs supporting mc operations may be configured with a supplemental antenna and a delay mechanism to provide transmit delay diversity on the forward link via a 3 antenna configuration this 3 antenna configuration may also exploit shared components to achieve greater reverse link sensitivity resulting in e g reduced ms transmit power in some cells 0024 fig2 a is a schematic diagram of a portion of a multi carrier base station mc bs 200 that supports multicarrier operation in accordance with an embodiment of the inventions bs 200 incorporates an auxiliary antenna arrangement 220 in addition to two conventional passive antennas 218 222 auxiliary antenna arrangement 220 may be configured as a passive antenna arrangement but it could otherwise be configured thus bs 200 may be implemented in an existing conventional mc bs system having two passive antennas 218 222 the auxiliary passive antenna array 220 may be positioned so as to employ space diversity with respect to each of the two passive antennas 218 222 the distance between each of passive antennas 218 222 and passive antenna 220 depends on the frequency of operation and can be determined using methods known in the art for example the distance required for space diversity for a large cell may be 10 wavelengths of the transmitted signal auxiliary passive antenna array 220 transmits a delayed signal version for all the channels and thus also provides transmit diversity for the two passive antennas 218 222 and their respective channels during multicarrier operation of bs 200 carriers generated by bts.