A method for receiving a pilot symbol in a receiver is disclosed. In one embodiment, the method includes removing a cyclic prefix from a received sequence to produce a modified sequence, transforming the modified sequence to a first frequency domain sequence according to a first transform, demapping a plurality of distributed subcarriers in the transformed modified sequence to extract a plurality of received symbols, deriving an intermediate channel estimate for each of the plurality of received symbols, and interpolating a final channel estimate based on the plurality of derived intermediate channel estimates. In one exemplary embodiment, the received symbols have one or more predefined characteristics such as a constant amplitude, and zero autocorrelation (CAZAC sequence).