Abstract: In a communications network having time-dispersed signals, there is provided a mechanism for soft decision decoding. It comprises: radio reception of a time-dispersed signal, at least partly equalizing those time-dispersal effects, recovering information contained in the signal, multiplying with that recovered information the absolute value of that at-least-partly-equalized signal (scaled by a number derived from channel conditions over a time during which at least part of the information to be recovered is distributed), and error-correcting the multiplied information by a Viterbi algorithm channel decoding scheme of error correction. Accordingly, soft decision information is generated from within the equalization process itself.