In this paper, a novel synchronization method is proposed for a heterogeneous cognitive radio that combines public safety mobile communication systems (PMCSs) with commercial mobile wireless communication systems (CMWCSs). The proposed method enables self-synchronization of the PMCSs as well as co-synchronization of PMCSs and CMWCSs. In this paper, the self-synchronization indicates that each system obtains own timing synchronization. The co-synchronization indicates that a system recognizes data transmitted from other systems correctly. In our research, we especially focus on PMCS self-synchronization because it is one of the most difficult parts of our proposed cognitive radio that improves PMCS's communication quality. The proposed method is utilized for systems employing differentially encoded π/4 shift QPSK modulation. The synchronization can be achieved by correlating envelopes calculated from a PMCS's received signals with subsidiary information (SI) sent via a CMWCS. In this paper, the performance of the proposed synchronization method is evaluated by computer simulation. Moreover, because this SI can also be used to improve the bit error rate (BER) of PMCSs, BER improvement and efficient SI sending methods are derived, after which their performance is evaluated.