The present invention provides architectures and methods which enables faster and more power efficient detection of channel parameters used by a communication system. Various parallel preamble correlator structures are able to perform searches for multiple preambles in parallel. The received samples are correlated with different delays between the samples corresponding to the different possible channel parameters that may be used by the communication system. Processing elements used in the preamble search may be shared among the parallel preamble search sections of a given architecture to reduce costs and power consumption. Decimation and filtering may also be used to reduce the interference from adjacent channels.