Techniques for performing joint detection with a common midamble for downlink transmission are described. In one design, a user equipment (UE) may obtain samples for a burst transmitted by a Node B on the downlink. The burst may include at least one data field and a common midamble. The UE may derive a channel impulse response estimate for each of multiple orthogonal codes based on (i) a channel impulse response estimate derived based on samples for the common midamble and (ii) a traffic-to-pilot ratio (T2P) estimated for that orthogonal code based on the samples for burst. The UE may perform joint detection, for the multiple orthogonal codes, on samples for the at least one data field based on the multiple channel impulse response estimates.