A wireless multiple antenna system (200) uses a multi-antenna subsystem (211) to generate a composite sample waveform by continuously sweeping a plurality of receive beams (RX1-RXM) during each SSB transmission in a plurality of transmit beams (TX1-TX64), generating a composite received signal strength metric value from a batch of samples collected over the plurality of receive beams to determine the presence of the SSB, and then jointly searching the composite sample waveform for an optimal receive beam and an SSB frequency of any detected SSB that are used by the UE (210) to perform a cell search which matches a transmit beam from the base station (201) to the optimal receive beam.