a g rake receiver circuit and may further include or be associated with a combining circuit 38 a signal quality estimation circuit 40 a channel estimation circuit 42 pilot fingers correlators 44 and traffic fingers correlators 46 more particularly the receiver circuit 30 may be configured to operate as a non parametric g rake receiver circuit wherein it generates traffic symbol estimates z u2032 from the received communication signal based on combining weights determined from measured data correlations the traffic symbol estimates may be output for further processing such as by a demodulator circuit 48 notably as will be detailed below the traffic symbol estimates z u2032 are inherently scaled in amplitude for symbol detection thus obviating the need for an explicit amplitude scaling step before comparing the symbol estimates to a reference constellation fig3 illustrates an embodiment of processing logic for operating the receiver circuit 30 and its supporting or related circuits first the correlation circuit s 32 determine data correlations from the despread traffic values obtained from the received communication signal by the traffic fingers 46 step 100 assuming zero mean the data correlations may be expressed as a covariance matrix r traf which can be calculated as r traf 1 m sym u2062 k u2062 u2211 i 0 m sym 1 u2062 u2062 u2211 k 0 k 1 u2062 u2062 x i k u2062 x i k h eq u2062 6 where x i k is the vector of finger despread values from each rake finger for the traffic data for the i th symbol in the slot of the k th channelization code or user u2014 i e the.