Systems and methods for operating a communication device. The methods comprise: receiving a carrier signal modulated with a modulation signal comprising a symbol conveyed in a symbol timing window; determining an energy value for each timeslot in the symbol timing window; combining the energy values to determine a combined energy value for each bit of the symbol in a manner in which the combined energy value is penalized if more than one timeslot of the symbol timing window comprises energy contained in the carrier signal; and generating a soft value for each bit of the sequence of bits by combining the combined energy value with a weight value, where the weight value is selected from a plurality of weight values based on a number of timeslots in the symbol timing window which comprises energy contained in the carrier signal.