A receiver includes a Viterbi-like equalizer that provides diversity combining of soft values to produce reliability information. The output reliability information at time k is the average of the first reliability information at time k and the second reliability information at time (k−1) after being normalized by the noise power. The first reliability information at time k is the difference between the two accumulated metrics of the two preceding nodes arriving at the same node having the global minimum node metric at time k over all transitions of all states. The second reliability function at time k is the difference between the best accumulated metric characterized by the last (L−1) bit being binary “one” and the best accumulated metric characterized by the last (L−1) bit being binary “zero.”