Radio communication using a reception technique in which a resultant signal is obtained by combining signals (a) that originate from two or more independent sources that have been modulated with identical information-bearing signals and (b) that may vary in their transmission characteristics at any given instant. Note 1: Diversity transmission and reception are used to obtain reliability and signal improvement by overcoming the effects of fading, outages, and circuit failures. Note 2: When using diversity transmission and reception, the amount of received signal improvement depends on the independence of the fading characteristics of the signal as well as circuit outages and failures.