A Generalized Rake (G-Rake) receiver is adapted for Golden code reception in a CDMA system. Signals transmitted by two or more transmit antennas are received at two or more receiver antennas. The signal from each receiver antenna is despread, and channel estimation is performed for each transmit antenna. G-Rake combining weights are calculated based on impairment correlation across G-Rake fingers and channel coefficients corresponding to each transmit antenna. The despread values from each symbol period are combined over a plurality of symbol periods based on the combining weights. The combined values are processed using coefficients derived from the Golden number to generate a set of decision variables, and the Golden encoded symbols are jointly detected from the decision variables. In some embodiments, spherical decoding and triangularization significantly simplify the decoding problem formulation.