A radio frequency receiver for receiving an interleaved single carrier chirp spread spectrum signal based on a chirp sequence includes: a demodulator configured to receive, demodulate, and digitize a modulated radio frequency (RF) signal to form a digital baseband signal; and a signal decoder configured to: despread the digital baseband signal by at least: buffering signal data into blocks of L samples; multiplying the blocks of data with a conjugate of the chirp sequence to form a result; and performing a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) on the result; equalize data from the FFT to form N data values, where N is the number of subchannels; transform the N data values into N demodulation symbols via an N-point inverse Fourier transform; and decode the demodulation symbols to form codec symbols.