A baseband processing module for use within a Radio Frequency (RF) transceiver includes a downlink/uplink interface, TX processing components, a processor, memory, RX processing components, and a turbo decoding module. The RX processing components receive a baseband RX signal from the RF front end, produce a set of IR samples from the baseband RX signal, and transfer the set of IR samples to the memory. The turbo decoding module receives at least one set of IR samples from the memory, forms a turbo code word from the at least one set of IR samples, turbo decodes the turbo code word to produce inbound data, and outputs the inbound data to the downlink/uplink interface. The turbo decoding module performs metric normalization based upon a chosen metric performs error detection operations, and extracts information from a MAC packet that it produces.