A mobile device comprises multiple receive antennas to receive spatially independent multipath signals from multiple transmit antennas located on a single base station. The mobile device concurrently generates a RAKE-based equivalent single path signal (RAKE ESPS) and an equalizer-based equivalent single path signal (equalizer ESPS) for the multipath signals received via each receive antenna. The generated RAKE ESPS or the generated equalizer ESPS is selected for channel decoding. Reference signal components are extracted from the multipath signals received to determine noise components, which is used to determine signal quality information of the generated RAKE ESPS and the generated equalizer ESPS. A final ESPS is selected from the generated RAKE ESPS and the generated equalizer ESPS based on the corresponding determined signal quality information. The selected final ESPS is diversity processed by combining signal components over the transmit/receive antennas. Transmission parameters are determined for channel decoding the combined signals.