Patent ID: 6990158

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a compensation circuit adapted to receive input samples from a received multipath signal and compensate input samples using secondary signal estimates to form compensated samples; an estimation circuit adapted to receive magnitude and phase information corresponding to a secondary path signal in the received multipath signal and output a current secondary signal estimate for a current input sample based on the magnitude and phase information and a selected one in a running sequence of past nominal phase values derived from prior input samples; a hard-decision circuit adapted to determine a nominal phase value for each input sample, wherein said hard-decision circuit outputs a selected one from a defined set of nominal phase values as the nominal phase value; a buffer circuit adapted to maintain the running sequence of past nominal phase values in successive buffer positions corresponding to successively greater sample time offsets with respect to the current input sample; and a buffer interface circuit adapted to receive path delay information corresponding to the secondary path signal and provide said estimation circuit with the selected past nominal phase value by retrieving the past nominal phase value currently held in one of said buffer positions corresponding to a sample time offset equal to the received path delay information; wherein said apparatus is operative to remove secondary path signal interference from the input samples for output as compensated samples to an associated communications system.