Techniques are described for wireless communication. A method of wireless communication at a first wireless device includes identifying a template mapping of a plurality of ports to a first plurality of frequency subcarriers and a first plurality of time periods of a template time-frequency resource grid; mapping a plurality of resource elements of an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) time-frequency resource grid to the plurality of ports based at least in part on the template mapping; receiving a reference signal from a second wireless device, on a subset of the plurality of ports, based at least in part on the mapping; and decoding the reference signal from a subset of the plurality of resource elements based at least in part on the mapping. In some cases, each port of the plurality of ports is associated with a corresponding radio frequency (RF) chain.