An equalizing structure and method for a wireless communication system receiving device. Two or more transmit signals transmitted in parallel from one or more transmitters are received in received signal vectors representing two or more received data streams, the signals including information modulated onto carrier signals according to a modulation scheme, all possible transmit signals being represented by candidate constellation values in the signal constellation of the modulation scheme. A processor calculates an estimate for a constellation value of a received signal and determines a number of candidate constellation values in the vicinity of the estimated constellation value in the signal constellation. A metric value calculator calculates metric values based on the received signal vectors and the product of channel estimation values with candidate signal vectors. A maximum likelihood detector detects one of the candidate signal vectors having a minimum Euclidean distance to a respective received signal vector as a most likely transmit signal vector based on the metric values.