  Receiver diversity combining methods play a key role in combating the
detrimental effects of fadingin wireless communication and other applications.
A novel diversity combining method is proposedwhere a universal, i.e., channel
independent, orthogonal dimension-reducing space-time transformationis applied
prior to quantization of the signals. The scheme may be considered as the
counterpart ofAlamouti modulation, and more generally of orthogonal space-time
block codes.
