Performance of Concatenated Reed-Solomon and Convolutional Codes for Digital Modems in HF Data Communications

In this paper, we propose an improved error correction code in order to improve the performance of digital modems for HF data communications and verify the performance of the proposed scheme. The proposed scheme employs outer Reed-Solomon codes concatenated with inner convolutional codes. Numerical results show that the proposed system significantly improves the bit error rate performance compared to the conventional PACTOR-III modems. Hence, the proposed system can improve the bandwidth efficiency of digital modems for HF data communications.