To find frequency slots over which a cognitive radio can send an opportunistic transmission, a wideband spectrum is searched with a lower resolution to identify bandwidth slices having low or no signal levels. The identified bandwidth slices are searched with a higher resolution candidate frequency slices are selected as those bandwidth slices having least signal levels after the higher resolution searching, and ranked from lowest signal level to highest. A spectrum detection algorithm is executed on the selected candidate frequency slices in the order of the rank until it is decided that one of them has sufficiently free spectrum. A transmission is then opportunistically sent on the decided candidate frequency slice. Ongoing to the searching, intermittent signals are detected and a band about them is searched with the lower resolution to determine if the band about the detected intermittent signal is an identified bandwidth slice. Various techniques are shown for how the fine search is conducted.