An improvement of a digital wireless receiver comprises a processing circuit for processing a plurality of received signals, and providing a processed signal having an amplitude; and an adjusting circuit for adjusting the amplitude of the processed signal, the adjusting circuit coupled to the processing circuit, where the adjusting circuit adjusts the amplitude as a function of distortion of the plurality of received signals. The processing circuit can weight and combine the plurality of received signals. The distortion can be estimated from a squared error of the plurality of received signals, which can be averaged over a sliding window. The function can comprise multiplying the processed signal by square root of the averaged squared error. Such amplitude adjustment is useful to maintain the soft decision information for the processed signal that is fed to a base station having soft decision decoding, or can be used in the base station with soft decoding.