A receiver comprises a demodulator to estimate channel impulse response and timing synchronization information for the received signal and to select a modulation technique for demodulating the received signal; and a channel decoder to produce a binary sequence from the received signal demodulated according to the selected modulation technique; wherein the demodulator: demodulates the received signal according to a first modulation technique and a second modulation technique to produce a first demodulated signal and a second demodulated signal, respectively; calculates a minimum distance between a first reconstructed signal including the training sequence and the first demodulated signal to estimate the channel impulse response and timing synchronization information; calculates a minimum distance between a second reconstructed signal including the training sequence and the second demodulated signal to estimate the channel impulse response and timing synchronization information; compares the minimum distance corresponding to the first demodulated signal with the minimum distance corresponding to the second demodulated signal; and selects the modulation technique, from among the first and second modulation techniques, that corresponds to the smaller minimum distance.