A signal received via a fading channel is decoded in radio frequency receiver by first demodulating the signal to a baseband signal, and serial to parallel converting the baseband signal to a precoded signal. Then, a channel matrix is estimated from the precoded signal, and symbols are detected in the precoded signal using the channel matrix. The decoding uses probabilistic data association. The detecting initializes a probability distribution for each symbol, and selects an ordering in which to update the probability distributions. The probability distribution for each symbol are updated according to the ordering, until a termination condition is reached, and then demapped and parallel to serial converted to estimate a sequence of bits used to generate the signal.