A technique for generating a demodulation ordering used in receive signal processing operations in a BLAST MIMO receiver that is based on a relative comparison of near-to-far resistance measures among vectors forming the estimated channel transfer function matrix is disclosed. This near-to-far resistance comparison provides a resulting demodulation ordering believed equivalent to that provided by conventional V-BLAST techniques without requiring computation of the pseudoinverse of the estimated channel matrix. Also disclosed is a successive interference cancellation technique which employs Multi-Staged Nested Weiner Filtering (MSNWF) to recover soft estimates of the transmitted component-symbols from the vector observed at the BLAST MIMO receiver. Employing such MSNWF estimation is believed advantageous in that it avoids the need for matrix inversion operations involving the estimated channel matrix, Covariance Level Order Recursive-MSNWF (MSNWF-COR) or MSNWF Conjugate Gradient techniques may be conveniently implemented to provide the desired MSNWF estimation.