Patent ID: 6909736

Claim:
A method for acquiring a received spread spectrum signal, the received signal having a carrier component at a carrier frequency, a code component having a code period, and a data component, the acquiring including matching the phase of a replica of the code component to the phase of the received code component and also determining any shift in the carrier frequency away from a transmitted carrier frequency, the method comprising the steps of: a) performing a first acquisition of the received signal so as to provide an approximately estimated carrier frequency and a phase of the replica of the code component and also so as to provide a code-wiped and an approximately carrier-wiped signal; and b) performing a second acquisition of the approximately carrier-swiped signal, the second acquisition including a substep of data wipe-off involving a squaring or a neighbor multiplication operation on a signal derived from the approximately carrier-wiped signal; thereby providing a correction to the approximately estimated carrier frequency, a correction that accounts for the carrier frequency shift remaining after the first acquisition.