A multichannel-spread-spectrum transmitter for communicating a plurality of data-sequence signals from a plurality of data channels using parallel chip-sequence signals, comprising: a header device, coupled to a first data channel of said plurality of data channels, for concatenating a header to a first data-sequence signal to generate a header frame; a processor, coupled to the header device and to the plurality of data channels, for synchronizing the plurality of data channels; a chip-sequence generator for generating a plurality of chip-sequence signals, each of said plurality of chip-sequence signals being orthogonal to other chip-sequence signals within the plurality of chip-sequence signals; a plurality of product devices, coupled to the plurality of data channels and to said chip-sequence generator, for multiplying the plurality of data-sequence signals by a plurality of chip-sequence signals, respectively, thereby generating a plurality of spread-spectrum channels, the plurality of spread-spectrum channels including a spread-spectrum-header channel and a plurality of spread-spectrum-data channels, the spread-spectrum-header channel generated by multiplying the header frame with a first chip-sequence signal, each of the plurality of spread-spectrum-data channels generated by multiplying a respective data-sequence signal by a respective chip-sequence signal; a combiner, coupled to said plurality of product devices, for algebraically combining the plurality of spread-spectrum channels as a multichannel-spread-spectrum signal; and a transmitter subsystem, coupled to said combiner, for transmitting the multichannel-spread-spectrum signal over a communications channel at a carrier frequency. view more