A wireless communication receiver, such as the receiver included in a wireless communication transceiver implemented in a base station or in a mobile station of a wireless communication network, includes a parametric G-RAKE receiver circuit and a method that compute parametric scaling parameters on a per transmission interval basis. In one embodiment, measured impairment correlations are obtained for an individual transmission slot and used to estimate instantaneous values of the scaling parameters. One or both of those instantaneous values are then constrained according to one or more defined limits. In other embodiments, multiple transmission slots are used to increase the number of measurements available to estimate the scaling parameters, with parameter constraining optionally applied. Further embodiments use iterative methods and/or solve for one parameter, and use the results to obtain the other parameter(s). One or more of these embodiments can be improved through the use of error correction/detection information.