A method and apparatus for determining operating modes in a receiver is described herein. A delay searcher in the receiver detects a signal image in the received signal. When the receiver is a RAKE receiver, a plurality of RAKE fingers coherently combine time-shifted versions of the received signal at different delays. Alternatively, when the receiver is a chip equalization receiver, an FIR filter coherently pre-combines the signal images in the received signal. A processor determines delays. In particular, the processor generates a first signal quality metric for a single-delay receiver mode, and generates a second signal quality metric for a multi-delay receiver mode. Based on a comparison of the first and second signal quality metrics, the processor selects the single-delay or the multi-delay receiver mode for processing the signal image.