A system determines an optimal set of base transceiver sets that are to transmit data over supplemental channels to a mobile station. A mobile station transmits periodic signal strength measurement message to rank the pilot signal strengths being received from the plurality of base station transceiver systems. Whenever the number of fundamental channel sectors that are active exceeds the maximum number of active supplemental channel sectors, periodic pilot strength measurement messages are transmitted by the mobile station. To improve resource usage, periodic pilot strength measurement messages are not transmitted as often as required to insure that the active supplemental channel sectors are the ones from which the strongest signals are received by the mobile station. Rather, a combination of periodic pilot strength measurement messages and calculated reverse link signal strength over spectral noise density values are used.