Systems and methods for improved coherent demodulation that account for variation of an effective channel estimation error with transmitted symbols are provided. In one embodiment, a wireless node includes a receiver front-end, a channel estimator, and a soft-value processor. The receiver front-end is adapted to output samples of a received signal. The channel estimator is adapted to estimate a channel between a transmitter of the received signal and the wireless node based on the samples of the received signal. The soft-value processor is adapted to process the samples of the received signal according to a soft-value generation scheme that accounts for variation of an effective channel estimation error with transmitted symbols to thereby provide corresponding soft values. By accounting for the variation of the effective channel estimation error with transmitted symbols, the soft-value processor provides improved performance, particularly in a low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) scenario.