a system and method for reducing multi - path distortion of an m - ary communication signal is implemented with m × n parallel processors , a multi - path estimator , a metric selector and a decision processor . parallel processors process each combination of possible signal symbols m and hypothesized guard times n , the output of the processors are supplied to the multi - path estimator which estimates the actual multi - path distortion of the transmitted symbol . the metric selector selects the processors with a guard time g n most closely approximating the estimate from the multi - path estimator . the selected outputs are used in a decision processor to determine the transmitted symbols . the selected outputs are low passed filtered .