Multiple-hop autocorrelation (MHAC) processing is considered in this paper as a means of estimating the parameters of frequency-hopping signals in the presence of broadband thermal noise. It is shown that power sampling in the MHAC domain suppresses the dependence on hopping frequency, carrier phase, and hop timing, while maintaining hop-rate information. Moreover, when the signal's hop-rate is known a priori or can be estimated reliably, the multiple-hop combining of single-hop autocorrelation (SHAC) estimates can be employed to extract hop-timing information. Taking advantage of these features, we propose and analyze a hop-rate estimator and an epoch estimator, based on maximum-likelihood arguments. The conditional mean and variance of both estimators are derived analytically and confirmed by extensive simulation.
