A method for carrying out channel equalization in a radio receiver wherein an impulse response is estimated, noise power is determined by estimating a co-variance matrix of the noise contained in a received signal before prefiltering, and tap coefficients of prefilters and an equalizer are calculated. The method comprises determining the noise power after prefiltering by estimating a noise covariance matrix, after which input signals of the channel equalizer are weighted by weighting coefficients obtained from the noise covariance estimation.