A method, system, and medium are provided for improving uplink performance of an antenna array configured for downlink beam forming. Beam forming requires an antenna element spacing that results in correlated downlink signals. Uplink reception preferably uses an element spacing such that uplink signals are uncorrelated. For an eight-element antenna configured for beam forming, using eight-branch combining to produce a single resultant signal is thus less than optimal. In an embodiment, non-adjacent elements in the antenna array, which receive uncorrelated signals, may be combined in pairs with two-branch combining. The four resultant signals may then be combined using four-branch combining to provide a single resultant signal.