A signal-to-noise estimator is provided for estimating the signal-to-noise ratio in wireless fading channels. The estimator can be applied to likelihood ratio estimation of turbo decoders in third generation wide-band code division multiple access (WCDMA) systems. Time-multiplexed samples of pilot symbols from a wireless receiver are supplied to the estimator to obtain individual estimates of signal power and/or noise power. The estimator uses a de-correlating filter in which the coefficients are known functions (such as eigen-vectors) of the auto-correlation matrix for a wireless channel. The decorrelating filter is used by the estimator to map an observation vector into a set of statistically independent samples. The energy of each vector component is computed individually and combined to produce an aggregate sum for the vector. The aggregate sum can be subtracted from the pilot tone power in order to produce an estimate of noise power.