  A pilot-assisted transmission (PAT) scheme is proposed for short
blocklengths, where the pilots are used only to derive an initial channel
estimate for the list construction step. The final decision of the message is
obtained by applying a non-coherent decoding metric to the codewords composing
the list. This allows one to use very few pilots, thus reducing the channel
estimation overhead. The method is applied to an ordered statistics decoder for
communication over a Rayleigh block-fading channel. Gains of up to $1.2$ dB as
compared to traditional PAT schemes are demonstrated for short codes with QPSK
signaling. The approach can be generalized to other list decoders, e.g., to
list decoding of polar codes.
