Patent ID: 7512198

Claim:
A receive site for a site diversity-combining communication system, comprising: a first soft-decision computation module that translates sampled symbol values from coded symbols of a transmitted signal into a stream of first soft-decision values from the transmitted signal, wherein the first soft-decision values are first log likelihood ratio values and the second soft-decision values are second log likelihood ratio values; a connection to at least one other site that provides data for a stream of second soft-decision values from the transmitted signal, wherein the stream of first soft-decision values and the stream of second soft-decision values are digitally synchronized; and a soft-decision combining module that combines the first soft-decision values and the second soft-decision values into combined soft-decision values for each coded symbol of the transmitted signal, wherein the soft-decision combining module averages the first log likelihood ratio values for a coded symbol of the transmitted signal with the second log likelihood ratio values for the coded symbol of the transmitted signal to provide the combined soft-decision values for the coded symbol of the transmitted signal.