The invention provides a hybrid ARQ technique for transmitting a data unit on a radio channel in a communication system to a receiver. After encoding the data unit into a sequence of code words using an encoding parameter, a first code word is transmitted, and an ACK or NAK is received from the receiver. If a NAK is received, the next code word of the sequence is transmitted. According to the invention, a measurement value indicating the current channel conditions is determined by counting the NAK messages and/or evaluating the encoding parameters. Preferably the measurement values are the overall coding rate, the average number of retransmissions per data unit, and the average number of retransmissions per code word. In the preferred embodiment, the transmitter comprises a NAK counter. Besides the improved transmission measurement, the present invention provides using this measurement for adaptation purposes.