A modified RAKE receiver, referred to as a WRAKE receiver, is used in CDMA communications. It is particularly adaptable to a subtractive CDMA system. The receiver includes a radio receiver for receiving and demodulating a composite signal of overlapping transmitted signals (spread signals), a sampler to sample the received signals, a selector for selecting different groups of samples, a correlator for correlating the samples with known despreading codes and a comparator to determine the symbol transmitted. The receiver also includes a combiner which combines either different groups of samples together or combines different correlation values together. The sample groups selected are channel independent and combine data received from different time shifts. Likewise, the sample groups for each channel and the correlation values are time-of-arrival independent.