A code division multiple access (CDMA) communications device includes a CDMA receiver to isolate a CDMA signal, and a processor to generate a quantized sample representation of the CDMA signal. The processor performs a hard correlation between the quantized sample representation of the CDMA signal and a quantized representation of a reference to generate a coarse time alignment. Based upon the coarse time alignment, the processor performs a soft correlation between actual values of the CDMA signal and the reference.