A method and system are provided for the reception of a biorthogonally-modulated RF signal in a simplex free-space system. The method is found to substantially diminish the coupling between the error probabilities of those bits associated with signal selection and those bits associated with signal polarity in prior art biorthogonal receivers. By decoupling the error probabilities, the polarity information error rate is reduced and consequently the overall error rate of the receiver system is improved. The receiver system preserves soft-decision reliability information for the signal selection bits in a manner so that the information is insensitive to uncompensated amplitude fluctuations in the received signal. A symbol deinterleaver in the receiver is located between the correlators and the bit estimators. The method and system are applicable to all known biorthogonal signal sets but requires a specific interleaving structure in the corresponding transmitter system.