Processing for mode S signals suffering multipath distortion

An aircraft communication system, comprising:

• a plurality of omnidirectional receivers, each receiver having a function of omnidirectionally receiving aircraft transmissions and developing therefrom two types of information strings, namely a data string, indicative of a message in said aircraft transmission, and a corresponding confidence string indicating the reliability of the developed data string;
• a master data processor;
• and
• a data communication link for transmitting data between said plurality of omnidirectional receivers and said master data processor, said master data processor receiving, via said data communication link, the data strings and corresponding confidence strings developed by each of said plurality of omnidirectional receivers and said master data processor, said master data processor receiving, via said data communication link, the data strings and corresponding confidence strings developed by each of said plurality of omnidirectional receivers for performing a bit-by-bit comparison of the received data strings and corresponding confidence strings, so as to develop by said comparison a corrected data string which minimizes the use of data bits from the data strings received over the data communication link that are indicated by the corresponding confidence strings as having a low reliability.