551 552 the energy measure causes the timing control unit 560 to apply signal 561 to switch 553 in order to maximize the received rf energy by toggling between receiving antennas 551 and 552 this measurement is nominally made during the first few instants of the received waveform normally during the sync interval the receiver demodulation circuitry of the receiver portion 550 650 of the mobile station 102 104 will begin to recover bit synchronization and make received bit estimations these estimations are passed to the sfd 574 the phy phy parser 578 can then extract its information fields one of which indicates the length of the following data packet the timing control unit 560 uses this length to extract the next fragment and store it in the receive buffer 580 via control 562 in this invention once a data packet has been buffered e g fragmented the timing control unit 560 will recycle and again begin observing the output of the sfd 574 in anticipation of the next fragment should a subsequent sfd 574 not be detected the timing control unit 560 will return to observing the energy detector 570 fig6 illustrates a circuit diagram 600 of an infrastructure device 690 transmitting to a mobile station 102 104 utilizing a diversity receiver 550 650 for receiving an rf signal on a first receiver and demodulation path and a second receiver and demodulation path in a wlan system a potential difficulty with concatenating long transmission.