Also known as: Reed–Solomon code, Reed-Solomon

Reed–Solomon is a block error-correction code that works on multi-bit symbols rather than individual bits, making it especially good at correcting bursts of errors.¹

Reed–Solomon adds parity symbols that correct bursts of damaged symbols — used across P25 and DMR.

How it works

It adds parity symbols so that a number of symbol errors can be located and corrected. It is frequently paired with interleaving to spread burst errors across codewords.

Relevance to SDR

Reed–Solomon protects parts of P25 and DMR (and is ubiquitous in storage and broadcast), helping the decoder recover data on marginal signals.

Sources

1. Reed–Solomon error correction — Wikipedia, for the symbol-oriented block code and burst-error correction. ↩

See also

• Forward error correction (FEC)
• BCH code
• Golay code
• Interleaving

Learn it step by step

• The demodulation pipeline

From the blog

• SDR Internals, Part 9: Framing & forward error correction