Aspects of the methods and apparatus relate to improving the overall decision quality of the Fractional-Dedicated Physical Channel (F-DPCH) channel. One aspect of the methods and apparatus relates to detecting bad channel conditions of a serving base station and improving the serving base station F-DPCH decoding performance in such bad conditions based on the serving base station signal-to interference ratio (SIR) estimation. Another aspect of the methods and apparatus relate to improving the overall decision quality of the F-DPCH channel in soft handover (HO) scenarios by increasing the non-serving base station F-DPCH channel rejections thresholds based on certain SIR estimations. The F-DPCH channel rejections thresholds are based on either the SIR of the non-serving base station, or a difference between non-serving base station SIR and serving base station SIR.