Abstract: A system and method is disclosed for determining the location of a mobile appliance using the reverse pilot channel provided in CDMA 2000 communication systems to determine an attribute (e.g., time of arrival, angle of arrival, time difference of arrival, received power level) of a reverse pilot signal at one or more wireless location sensors. A network overlay of wireless location sensors monitors the reverse pilot channel for a target mobile's reverse pilot signal. The monitored signal may be compared to a reference signal to determine a correlation and thereby determine an attribute of the target mobile's reverse pilot signal. The method may be performed independently from the communication system and without requiring retrieval of information bits from the mobile appliance. The reference signal may be generated from the unique long spreading code mask of the target mobile appliance which is typically a function of the ESN of the target mobile appliance.