The present invention is a system and method of use for a computer-implemented signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) estimation process for aiding in signal demodulation and message recovery or as an indication of recovered message fidelity. The SNR estimator produces estimates of the true channel SNR and tracks changes in the channel noise power over time. It operates on a collection of received data probability density functions (PDFs), either contained in closed form equations or stored in lookup tables. It allows for the estimation of both the instantaneous and average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values.