A wireless sensor with digital detector for monitoring the environment surrounding the sensor. The wireless sensor with digital detector comprises a configurable wireless transceiver with quadrature down and up converters, memory to store the real time received in phase and quadrature phase samples, a bank of phase rotators to phase rotate the received stored samples and a bank of in phase and quadrature phase constellation level slicers to detect the received bits. A control processor utilizes the received information, received signal strength and timing information to estimate and calculate various environmental parameters which can be used to activate different devices.