Fluid antenna systems (FASs) have recently emerged as a promising reconfigurable antenna technology for future wireless networks, owing to their unique ability to exploit fine-grained spatial channel variations within a compact aperture. In this paper, a single-input multiple-output (SIMO) FAS employing maximum-ratio combining (MRC) is investigated under the block-diagonal correlation model, where the ports of FAS are partitioned into independent blocks and the strongest port within each block is selected for MRC combining. Exact outage probability (OP) expressions are first derived in both convolution and characteristic-function forms. To gain further insights, closed-form high-SNR asymptotic expressions are developed, from which the diversity order is shown to approximate the number of ports. This result reveals that block partitioning influences only the coding gain and can therefore be optimized without compromising the diversity performance. For the ergodic rate (ER), a Gamma-matching approximation together with a tighter Jensen-based approximation is derived in closed form. Simulation results corroborate the analytical framework and demonstrate that: i) increasing either the number of ports or the number of blocks improves the system performance; ii) the diversity order depends solely on the number of ports; and iii) the proposed SIMO-FAS achieves comparable or superior outage performance to conventional MRC receivers despite employing fewer combining branches.

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