Methods and apparatus are described herein to provide for the decoding of signals in a MIMO communications system. Other embodiments may include a method of deriving a list of possible data vectors and corresponding metrics given a received signal vector and provide the list to a soft bits calculator. Further embodiments include a decoding apparatus that includes a shift and scale module, a linear receiver module, a list generator module and a lattice reduction module. The decoding apparatus may additionally include a soft bits calculator, in further embodiments.