In one embodiment, a battery-operated communication device “quick-samples” a frequency hopping sequence at a periodic rate corresponding to a substantially low duty cycle, and is discovered by (e.g., attached to) a main-powered communication device. During a scheduled sample, the main-powered communication device transmits a control packet to be received by the battery-operated communication device, the control packet containing timing information and transmitted to account for worst-case clock drift error between the two devices. The battery-operated communication device responds to the control packet with a link-layer acknowledgment containing timing information from the battery-operated communication device. Accordingly, the two devices may re-synchronize their timing based on the timing information in the control packet and acknowledgment, respectively.