Apparatus and methods for transmitting a preamble in a random access procedure are described herein. A user terminal may transmit two or more preambles to access a base station, for example, on a selected random access channel (RACH) in a contention-based random access procedure. The user terminal receives a random access response (RAR) from the base station, for example, on PDCCH, wherein the RAR is a response of the preambles transmitted by the transmitter. More than one preamble is transmitted by the user terminal in a contention-based random access procedure. In this way, the user terminal has a lower probability of transmitting the same preambles that other user terminals have transmitted. This helps the user terminal efficiently avoid a collision with other user terminals in the random access procedure. The user terminal therefore has a higher probability of a successful access.