An apparatus provides a baseband signal for exploiting receive antenna diversity by means of a digital baseband processor. The apparatus includes a combiner configured to temporally alternately select at least one sample of a first received signal corresponding to a first receive antenna and at least one sample of a second received signal corresponding to a second receive antenna and to interleave the selected samples of the first and second received signal to obtain a temporally continuous stream of samples of a baseband representation of a combined signal at an output of the combiner as the baseband signal for exploiting receive antenna diversity.