A rake receiver is a radio receiver designed to counter the effects of multipath fading. It does this by using several "sub-receivers" called "fingers", that is, several correlators each assigned to a different multipath component. Each finger independently decodes a single multipath component; at a later stage the contribution of all fingers are combined in order to make the most use of the different transmission characteristics of each transmission path. This could very well result in higher signal-to-noise ratio (or Eb/N0) in a multipath environment than in a "clean" environment.