The present invention provides a receiver for underwater acoustic telemetry which combines a decision feedback adaptive equalizer structure with a modified turbo-equalizer structure. The modified turbo-equalizer structure is of significantly reduced complexity because the decision feedback adaptive equalizer structure is operable to process a plurality of data channels to provide a single symbol data output stream for application to the input of the modified turbo-equalizer which uses a decision feedback equalized, interleaver, deinterleaver and a decoder. Either a hard viterbi decorder for single iteration processing or a soft in/soft out decorder such as a MAP decoder for multiple iteration can be used. The iteration provide improved performance compared to a normal DFE and lower complexity compared to the traditional turbo-equalizer.