Scaled and rotated alamouti coding

The present invention relates to an encoder for encoding incoming symbols of an incoming data stream into channel symbols of a channel data stream for transmission over a transmission channel as well as to a corresponding decoder. To improve the error rate compared to a known Alamouti encoder, a scaled (and further preferred, rotated) Alamouti encoder is proposed comprising: mapping means for block by block mapping incoming symbols onto pairs of channel symbols, a block comprising two incoming symbols, the mapping being arranged for mapping the block onto two pairs of channel symbols such that said two pairs of channel symbols include scaled versions of said two incoming symbols and/or of the complex conjugate of at least one of said two incoming symbols, said scaled versions being obtained by applying a scaling function having a scaling factor with an absolute value different from one and being piece-wise linear with at least two pieces, and output means for outputting said channel symbols.