Receiver with improved decoder

摘要

A receiver for receiving digital signals comprises a front end (18) for receiving RF signals and converting them into an input signal for an de-interleaver 22 for obtaining a de-interleaved signal. The output of the de-interleaver is connected to a decoder (24) which can be a Reed-Solomon decoder. The decoder (24) is able to use erasure information which indicates possible positions of errors in the de-interleaved signal for increasing the number of errors the decoder (24) can correct. In order to improve the error correcting capabilities of the receiver, this receiver comprises error prediction means (26) which predict the position of errors in the next codewords due to error bursts from the errors found in the present codeword. Such a predicted error is handled as an erasure by the decoder (24). To prevent that more erasures are presented to the decoder (24) than it can handle, it is proposed according to the present invention to determine a probability measure for all predicted errors and to present only those errors to the decoder (24) having the largest probability.