Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communication are described. A wireless communications system may support techniques for using non-staggered reference signals to increase the efficiency of the system and reduce the complexity of channel estimation. A base station may schedule a transmission to a user equipment (UE) including pilot tones mapped to a first symbol and a second symbol. In some cases, the pilot tones on the first and second symbols may be non-contiguous, and the base station may scramble the pilot tones on the first and second symbols according to the same scrambling sequence. In other cases, the pilot tones on the first and second symbols may be contiguous, and the pilot tones may be scrambled according to the same or different scrambling sequences. These techniques may result in reduced complexity for interference estimation and channel estimation at a UE.