Briefly, according to the invention, a receiver (100) for receiving and decoding a carder signal is described. A carrier signal is modulated with an information signal which has one of a plurality of formats. The receiver includes a circuit (104) for receiving and demodulating the carrier signal to produce a demodulated signal. The receiver (100) also includes a digital signal processing subsystem (108) for calculating the correlation function of the demodulated signal and based on this correlation function classifies the format of the demodulated signal. A decoder (118) is further included in the receiver (100) to decode the demodulated signal once it has been classified.