A rake receiver is a radio receiver designed to counter the effects of multipath fading . It does this by using several "sub-receivers" each delayed slightly in order to tune in to the individual multipath components. Each component is decoded independently, but at a later stage combined in order to make the most use of the different transmission characteristics of each transmission path. This could very well result in higher SNR (or EbNo ) in a multipath environment than in a "clean" environment.
Rake receivers are common in a wide variety of radio devices, including mobile phones and wireless LAN equipment.