During operation of a secondary communication system, nodes having different channel monitoring capabilities or requirements will cooperatively monitor possible frequencies for transmissions, each node using only a subset of all possible modulation sensing schemes. All nodes will share channel occupancy information to other nodes within the communication system. For example, a first group of nodes may monitor possible frequencies for television transmissions, while a second group of nodes may monitor the possible frequencies for APCO 25 transmissions. A group of nodes may also cooperatively monitor possible frequencies for more than one type of modulation transmission. Channel information will be shared among the nodes.