In a TDMA cellular communications system, optimal sampling of symbols in an information sequence is maintained by a method of timing tracking in which, recursively, indirect variables of a linear complex vector are estimated from received samples and previous estimates of the indirect variables, the sampling delay, and a complex fading factor, and the complex fading factor and the sampling delay are estimated by non-linear transformations of the estimated indirect variables. The timing tracking follows a timing recovery process which produces initial estimates. An implementation of the method uses a Kalman filter having constant filter gains and a transformation of the received samples and sampling delay to a reduced time interval.