A communications receiver includes an antenna, and a burst signal acquisition circuit coupled to the antenna to detect a burst signal received over a wireless communications channel. The burst signal has a burst structure that includes channel-corrupted known preamble bits, channel-corrupted known probe bits and channel-corrupted unknown data bits. A channel estimator is coupled to the burst signal acquisition circuit to generate a-priori a gain vector based on uncorrupted known probe bits, and to perform a recursive least squares (RLS) operation to determine an impulse response of the wireless communications channel based on the channel-corrupted known probe bits and the gain vector. A maximum likelihood sequence estimator (MLSE) or equalizer is coupled to the channel estimator and the burst signal acquisition circuit.