Digital television broadcasting signals employ parallel concatenated convolutional coding, commonly called “turbo coding”, to improve reception by receivers in motor vehicles. Turbo coded Reed-Solomon codewords are transversally disposed in the payload fields of encapsulating MPEG-2-compliant packets to improve the capability of the Reed-Solomon coding to overcome deep fades. Turbo codewords are transmitted more than once in so-called “staggercasting”. Reception of DTV signals is improved by combining soft decisions concerning repeated transmissions of turbo codewords before turbo decoding. Only the data components of turbo codewords are transmitted twice in “punctured” staggercasting of turbo codewords, with parity components being transmitted only once, so code rate is reduced by a smaller factor than two.