Abstract The problem of receiving direct sequence (DS) spread spectrum, binary phase shift keyed (BPSK) information in pulsed noise and continuous wave (CW) jamming is studied in additive white noise. An automatic gain control is not modelled. The general system theory of receiver analysis is first presented and previous literature is reviewed. The study treats the problem of decision making after matched filter or integrate and dump demodulation. The decision methods have a great effect on system performance with pulsed jamming. The following receivers are compared: hard, soft, quantized soft, signal level based erasure, and chip combiner receivers. The analysis is done using a channel parameter D, and bit error upper bound. Simulations were done in original papers using a convolutionally coded DS/BPSK system. The simulations confirm that analytical results are valid. Final conclusions are based on analytical results. The analysis is done using a Chernoff upper bound and a union bound. The analysis is presented with pulsed noise and CW jamming. The same kinds of methods can also be used to analyse other jamming signals. The receivers are compared under pulsed noise and CW jamming along with white gaussian noise. The results show that noise jamming is more harmful than CW jamming and that a jammer should use a high pulse duty factor. If the jammer cannot optimise a pulse duty factor, a good robust choice is to use continuous time jamming. The best performance was achieved by the use of the chip combiner receiver. Just slightly worse was the quantized soft and signal level based erasure receivers. The hard decision receiver was clearly worse. The soft decision receiver without jammer state information was shown to be the most vulnerable to pulsed jamming. The chip combiner receiver is 3 dB worse than an optimum receiver (the soft decision receiver with perfect channel state information). If a simple implementation is required, the hard decision receiver should be used. If moderate complex implementation is allowed, the quantized soft decision receiver should be used. The signal level based erasure receiver does not give any remarkable improvement, so that it is not worth using, because it is more complex to implement. If receiver complexity is not limiting factor, the chip combiner receiver should be used. Uncoded DS/BPSK systems are vulnerable to jamming and a channel coding is an essential part of antijam communication system. Detecting the jamming and erasing jammed symbols in a channel decoder can remove the effect of pulsed jamming. The realization of erasure receivers is rather easy using current integrated circuit technology.