will be apparent to those skilled in the art that the present invention may be practiced without these specific details in other instances well known structures and devices are shown in block diagram form in order to avoid obscuring the concepts of the present invention in an exemplary embodiment of a communications system acquisition of a gated pilot signal can be achieved by employing a searching methodology that exploits certain characteristics of the gated pilot signal by way of example timing information from a gated pilot signal from one or more base stations may be used to search for additional gated pilot signals from other base stations in a cdma communications system once the search is complete a subscriber station can then readily identify the strongest gated pilot signal for acquisition more specifically the timing information from the gated pilot signal from one or more base stations may be used to predict when the remaining gated pilot signals will occur to reduce the overall search time the timing information can be extracted from a gated pilot signal even if it is too weak for acquisition although the various aspects of the present invention are described in the context of a cdma communications system those skilled in the art will appreciate that the techniques for acquiring a gated pilot signal described herein are likewise suitable for use in various other communications environment accordingly any reference to a cdma communications system is intended only to illustrate the inventive aspects of the present invention with the understanding that such inventive aspects have a wide range of applications fig1 is a system diagram of an exemplary communications system 100 the communications system provides a mechanism for a subscriber station 102 to access a network or communicate with.