Abstract: A communications apparatus and method use tapped delay lines as multiplexers and demultiplexers. In one embodiment, a receiver (100) uses a tapped delay line (110) as a demultiplexer to acquire a burst communication at very high data rates in the range of 2.5 to 80 Gbps with low preamble overhead. A sliding window correlator (114) continually samples the delay line (110) to determine when a PN encoded word is contained therein. The transmission frequency is pre-acquired before any data is present through the use of a ring oscillator frequency calibration loop (130) that is imbedded within the tapped delay line (110).