In this paper we introduce a new and simple method to estimate the symbol rate for single carrier systems of unknown modulation. The introduced technique detects the symbol rate from a continuous range of symbol rates, i.e. it does not assume a finite set of candidate symbol rates. The method does not require any knowledge about system parameters and is therefore totally blind. The method belongs to the family of autocorrelationbased symbol rate estimators, yet, unlike many such schemes, its performance is insensitive to the value of the roll-off factor. We then propose a simple method for frequency offset compensation also based on the autocorrelation function. Moreover, we study the effect of multipath channel on the estimator performance and propose different enhancements including exploiting more than one zero crossing. The proposed estimator is implemented as part of a complete DVB-C [1] receiver and is verified using simulations and results in robust performance even at low SNR and high frequency offsets.