Providing phase diversity combining of digital radio broadcast signals

Abstract

In one embodiment, a method for performing antenna diversity combining for digitally broadcast radio signals includes generating a first signal quality metric for a first signal obtained from an incoming digitally broadcast radio signal received in a first signal path, and similarly generating a second signal quality metric for a second signal obtained from the radio signal received in a second signal path. Then the first and second signals from these paths can be coherently combined based on the signal quality metrics to obtain a combined frequency domain symbol. In some embodiments, this combined frequency domain symbol may be remodulated to a time domain symbol. Also in some embodiments N tuners can be daisy chained to generate a final output that is either a frequency domain symbol of combined sub-carriers, soft bits to a forward error correction (FEC) decoder, or a remodulated time domain symbol. As a further possibility, each of the N tuners can use a different local oscillator (LO) frequency.