By including a cyclic prefix (CP), systems based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are capable of mitigating multipath with a single tap equalizer. Aiming at increasing the spectral efficiency, filter banks based multi carrier systems (FBMC) along with an offset quadrature amplitude modulation (OQAM) can be seen as a good alternative, although single tap equalizers may not provide enough robustness. In this regard we adapt to FBMC systems the structure consisting of a space-time processor together with a maximum likelihood sequence estimator (MLSE). Simulations show that in presence of large delay spreads the proposed scheme outperforms orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems in terms of bit error rate (...