the selected tfc is inspected in the example of fig1 the transport format associated with the rlc mac header includes an active send up bit so the corresponding l 1 tc is enabled at 142 in order to permit the rlc mac header information to be forwarded to the rlc mac layer at 143 at 144 the rlc mac layer provides an rlc sequence number to layer one together with an instruction to enable the l 1 tc associated with the rlc data block at 145 previously stored soft values of a previously received rlc data block having the same rlc sequence number are obtained and at 146 the presently received rlc data block from the received radio block is applied to its l 1 tc the l 1 tc for the rlc data block uses the stored soft values retrieved at 145 and the present rlc data block which also includes soft values to decode the present rlc data block at 147 new soft values produced by operation of the l 1 tc for example due to incorrect crc are stored and at 148 if the crc is correct the rlc data produced by the l 1 tc is forwarded to the rlc mac layer soft values are real numbers indicating both the value 1 or 0 of a received bit and the likelihood that the bit was correctly received a positive sign of the.