Abstract: In a receiver for processing a VSB modulated signal containing terrestrial broadcast high definition television information including data packets, the received signal is converted to a digital signal (19), demodulated (22) and equalized by an adaptive channel equalizer (34). An equalized signal is processed by decoding networks including a Reed-Solomon FEC error detecting and correcting network (44). The equalizer filter coefficient step size is dynamically adjusted during the adaption process as a function of the packet error rate. A local microcontroller (60) monitors the packet error rate at the Reed-Solomon error detector and instructs the equalizer to adjust the coefficient step size in a direction to reduce the packet error rate.