Practical applications of coding

Coding applications have grown rapidly in the past several years with cost-effective performance demonstrated on several channels. Convolutional coding with soft-decision Viterbi decoding has emerged as a standard technique and is particularly well adapted to the commnnication satellite channel. Decoder implementations are discussed and examples are cited. Robustness of code performance is emphasized and instances of actual coding gain surpassing theoretical or basic coding gain are given. Some promising future directions are noted.