In one implementation, a radio is tuned to a frequency and bandwidth such that it can accommodate a plurality of frequency channels of a plurality of RATs. Radio samples are acquired by the radio and stored to an input memory. The RAT specific cell search further includes performing a RAT specific frequency scan on the set of radio samples to detect candidate frequencies for each RAT. Performing the RAT specific frequency scan may comprise dividing the set of radio samples into the plurality of frequency channels for each RAT, sensing the energy for each channel for each RAT, determining a set of frequency channels having highest energy for each RAT and attempting to detect candidate frequencies having highest energy for each RAT.