A system (10) and method (50) of operating a wireless communication system between a transmit device (12) employing an array of transmit antennas and a receiver (15) can include transmitting (52) a beamformed signal with antenna weights computed based on knowledge of a plurality of channels forming an aggregate channel and computing (54) a set of characteristics for the aggregate channel such as a power delay profile, a frequency correlation, or an expected beamforming gain of the aggregate channel. Characteristics can also be based on factors among a number of transmit antennas, a beamforming weight application delay value, an expected Doppler profile, or an expected delay profile of the propagation channel. The method can further determine (58) a channel estimator based on the computed set of characteristics, receive (62) the beamformed signal, and compute (64) an aggregate channel estimate as a function of the channel estimator and the beamformed signal.
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