1. A method for decoding a signal in a radio frequency (RF) receiver with a set of one or more receive antennas, wherein the signal is precoded by means of a precoding matrix and then transmitted over a channel subject to fading, comprising; demodulating the signal to a baseband signal; serial to parallel converting the baseband signal to a precoded signal; estimating a channel matrix from the precoded signal; detecting symbols in the precoded signal using the channel matrix, wherein the decoding uses probabilistic data association, and the detecting further comprises: initializing a probability distribution for each symbol; selecting an ordering in which to update the probability distributions; and updating, according to the ordering, the probability distribution for is each symbol until a termination condition is reached; and demapping and parallel to serial converting the symbols to estimate a sequence of bits used to generate the signal.