This paper is concerned with the implementation of the equalization technique in a DCS 1800 system employing the soft-decision output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA), which makes the hardware complexity comparable to the hard decision MLSE and gives reliable performance. Also, the channel estimation technique with enhances the perfdormance of the soft-decision output equalizer is proposed, and the Viterbi decoder which operates effectively with the soft-decision output of the qualizer is implemented using the Very High Speed ICs Hardware Description Language (VHDL). From the simulation results, it is shown that the implemented Viterbi decoder operates effectively and the SOVA outperforms the hard-decision MLSE in terms of the frame erasure rate (FER) and bit error rate (BER).