A
rake receiver is a radio
receiver designed to counter the effects of
multipath fading. It does this by using several "sub-receivers" called
fingers, that is, several correlators each assigned to a different
multipath component. Each finger independently decodes a single multipath component; at a later stage the contribution of all fingers are combined in order to make the most use of the different
transmission characteristics of each transmission path. This could very well result in higher
signal-to-noise ratio (or
Eb/N0) in a multipath environment than in a "clean" environment.