Aspects of the present disclosure provide an apparatus and methods for detecting and handling a spurious Dedicated Physical Channel (DPCH) of a cell in an active set from a mobile station side. A user equipment determines a signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) for each channel of a plurality of channels associated with cells maintained in an active set. A spurious DPCH has the lowest SIR among the plurality of channels. The user equipment puts the detected spurious DPCH in an exclusion mode in which the spurious DPCH is excluded from at least one of channel decoding or SIRE calculation, while maintaining the cell associated with the spurious DPCH in the active set.