The significance of the most important operations performed by the noninvasive systems for fetal heart rate determination is investigated. The method of template subtraction for maternal ECG suppression is compared to the method based on independent component analysis. The QRS detector based on the classical slope-responsive preprocessing competes with the one that employs normalized matched filtering for QRS enhancement. A small database containing the four-channel abdominal ECG signals with the marked positions of the fetal QRS complexes is prepared to enable the investigations. The performed experiments show the factors that have the greatest impact on the results of the fetal QRS detection, and an effective approach to cope the problem is proposed.