The invention relates to an apparatus supporting an acquisition of a received code modulated signal by determining the correlation between the received code modulated signal and an available replica code sequence at different code phases. It is proposed that the apparatus comprises a first acquisition engine for selecting code phases which are good candidates for being the code phase at which a received code modulated signal and an available replica code sequence have the highest correlation. The apparatus further comprises a second acquisition engine for performing a refined comparison between a received code modulated signal and an available replica code sequence for each code phase selected by the first acquisition engine. The invention relates equally to a corresponding method and to a system comprising such an apparatus and a network.