Patent ID: 8576895

Claim:
A non-transitory machine-readable medium comprising instructions, which when executed by a machine, perform steps in a method for acquiring transmissions from a transmitter, wherein the transmissions include a periodically-repeating pseudonoise (PN) sequence, and wherein, the steps, upon execution, cause the machine to: receive a data block of samples, from the transmitter, comprising an integer number of repetitions of a received PN sequence; compute frequency data values from the data block of samples; provide a set of reference frequency values thereby hypothesizing a reference PN sequence of the transmitter; hypothesize a residual frequency; prune the frequency data values, based on the residual frequency and based on the integer number of repetitions, to provide a subset of the frequency data values; compute a correlation series using the subset of the frequency data values and the set of reference frequency values; and determine whether a matched condition occurs between the received PN sequence and the reference PN sequence using the correlation series.