The present invention provides a method and an apparatus for measuring a reception quality on a wireless communication link to a receiver by removing a bias in a plurality of received pilot symbols and obtaining a channel estimate for a channel, such as a wireless propagation channel, after substantially removing the bias. For a receiver, such as a rake receiver disposed in a base transceiver station, a bias removal module may extract a plurality of coefficients from a wireless propagation channel to remove a bias before a detector may receive the plurality of pilot symbols in the data stream to determine an error rate of the received pilot symbols where channel estimation is based on the received pilot symbols. In this manner, a systematic flaw in a link quality measurement based on an error rate of the received pilot symbols may be resolved for wireless communication systems.