Patent ID: 7418060

Claim:
A receiver system for demodulating and decoding a hierarchically modulated signal having a first modulation at a first hierarchical level and a second modulation at a second hierarchical level, comprising: a first demodulator for demodulating the first modulation of the hierarchically modulated signal; a symbol decoder, communicatively coupled to the first demodulator, for producing symbols from the demodulated first signal; an error decoder, communicatively coupled to the symbol decoder, for producing an error corrected symbol stream front the symbols from the demodulated first signal; a re-encoder for re-encoding the error corrected symbol stream; an error correcting demodulator, communicatively coupled to the re-encoder for demodulating the hierarchical signal using the error corrected and re-encoded symbols from the demodulated first signal; a subtractor, communicatively coupled to the re-encoder and the an error correcting demodulator, for subtracting the re-encoded symbol stream from the error correcting demodulated hierarchically modulated signal to produce a second signal; and a second symbol decoder, communicatively coupled to the subtractor for producing second symbols from the second signal.