A method of scaling soft symbols of an uplink E-DCH is provided, where the E-DCH is received from a user in a network for processing in a base station receiver in the network employing a log-MAP turbo decoding algorithm to process the E-DCH. The E-DCH includes an E-DPDCH from which the soft symbols are generated at the base station receiver, and an E-DPCCH used to transmit control information associated with the E-DPDCH, which along with configuration information from a radio network controller (RNC) of the network enables the base station receiver to determine a reference amplitude ratio linked to the actual power offset of the E-DPDCH from the legacy DPCCH. In the method, a reference E-DPDCH to DPCCH amplitude ratio is multiplied by a value greater than 1 to output a scaling factor, and the soft symbols are scaled by the scaling factor for processing by the log-MAP turbo decoding algorithm in the base station receiver.