The timing of an access burst received in a base station of a wireless communications system is determined by detecting one or more zero bit fields, constituting predetermined sequences of identical consecutive symbols in the access burst. For each possible timing of the access burst, whether a predetermined sequence is present in the respective position in the access burst is detected by predicting a sample of the received signal in the current symbol period from a sample of the received signal in the preceding symbol period assuming identity of symbols in the current and preceding symbol periods, producing a squared distance between predicted and received samples for the current symbol period, producing a threshold in dependence upon a power of the received signal for the preceding symbol period to accommodate fading, and comparing the squared distance with the threshold, continuing for successive current symbol periods until the end of the sequence or until the respective threshold is exceeded. The squared distances are accumulated for each possible timing, the least accumulated squared distance determining which of the possible timings for which the predetermined sequences are detected, if there is more than one, is the access burst timing.
