A low complexity adaptive equalizer for use in U.S. digital cellular radios demodulates .pi./4-shifted differentially encoded quadrature phase shift keyed (DQPSK) encoding in the presence of intersymbol interference (ISI) with reduced decoding complexity by employing an estimated received constellation which takes into account channel changes over time and ISI. The decoding complexity is reduced by tracking a reduced number of estimated reference symbol constellation points and taking advantage of the geometry to estimate the remaining symbol constellation points. Reference symbol constellation points are updated directly to compensate for changes in the channel, instead of determining channel impulse response (CIR) coefficients, and convolving the CIR coefficients with received symbols to determine new reference symbol constellation points.