A method of fast acquisition of a location of a device is disclosed. The method generally includes the steps of (A) repeatedly powering up automatically (i) a radio receiver and (ii) a given subset of a plurality of correlators in some of a plurality of search engines in the device, (B) buffering first data of a plurality of position signals received through the radio receiver over a first period, each of the position signals comprising a respective one of a plurality of code sequences, (C) searching through the first data with the correlators to find at least one of the code sequences, each of the correlators using a search window comprising a fraction of a code length of the code sequences and (D) generating an output signal carrying a location of the device based on the position signals corresponding to the code sequences that were found.