Techniques are provided to performing beamforming on a wireless communication link that employs multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) signal formatting techniques. At a first wireless communication device, a waveform is received at each of a plurality of antennas, where the waveform comprises a multi-carrier code division multiple access ranging transmission from each of one or more of a plurality of second wireless communication devices such that MC-CDMA ranging transmissions from two or more second wireless communication devices overlap in time and frequency. All codes in a set of possible codes that may be used by the second wireless communication devices are searched to determine whether which codes in the set are present in the one or more MC-CDMA ranging transmissions contained in the received waveform. For each of the one or more codes that are determined to be present in the received waveform, estimated channel path responses are computed at each of the plurality of antennas of the first wireless communication device. A downlink beamforming weight vector is computed from the estimated channel path responses computed for a corresponding code.