Method for antenna verification

1. A method of enabling a communications receiver to verify an antenna weight previously signalled by the communications receiver to a base station, the method including the steps of:

equalising a channel estimate of a dedicated pilot channel by the complex conjugate of a channel estimate of a common pilot channel to form an estimate of the transmission weight used by the base station;

for each transmission slot, combining a component of the transmission weight estimates for current and previous slots to form an optimised transmission weight estimate;

delaying an equalization of data symbol with the channel estimate in the base station; and

forming the optimised transmission weight estimate from a component of the transmission weight estimates for current, previous and future slots, wherein the communications receiver and base station form part of a W-CDMA wireless communication system, and

the component of the transmission weight estimates that is combined depends upon an uplink slot number of the last feedback information bit to effect the current transmission weight.

2. A method according to claim 1 , wherein the transmission weight includes any one or more of a phase-offset or amplitude-offset.

3. A method according to claim 1 , wherein the base station includes two or more antennas for transmit diversity.

4. A method according to claim 1 , wherein the in-phase component of the transmission weight estimates are combined when the uplink slot number of the last feedback information bit is an odd number.

5. A method according to claim 1 , wherein the quadrature phase component of the transmission weight estimates are combined when the uplink slot number of the last feedback information bit is an even number or zero.