Techniques for sending low reuse preambles in a wireless network are described. In an aspect, a base station may send a low reuse preamble on reserved frequency resources to allow terminals to detect the base station even in the presence of strong interfering base stations. The base station may generate the low reuse preamble to include a pilot portion and a data portion. The base station may determine frequency resources reserved for sending low reuse preambles by base stations. The base station may then send the low reuse preamble on the reserved frequency resources, e.g., at a pseudo-randomly selected time. A terminal may detect for low reuse preambles sent by the base stations on the reserved frequency resources. The terminal may recover information for a base station from a detected low reuse preamble.