A method and apparatus for supervising a dedicated control channel when in the discontinuous transmission mode. The mobile station monitors the frames it receives from a base station and maintains a counter of bad, good, and empty frames, referred to as CNT1, CNT2, CNT3, respectively. If a received frame is a good frame, CNT1 is reset to zero and CNT2 is incremented. If the received frame is a bad frame, CNT1 is incremented and CNT2 is reset to zero. If the received frame is an empty frame, CNT1 and CNT2 are unchanged but CNT3 is incremented. A transmitter coupled to the mobile station is enabled or disabled depending upon which, if any, of the CNTs reaches or exceeds a designated threshold value. In another embodiment, an average aggregated value reflecting the strength of the pilot signals in an active set, measured at the mobile station, is used for comparison to a threshold.