Rational rate punctured convolutional codes for soft-decision Viterbi decoding

We present rational rate k/n punctured convolutional codes (n up to 8, k=1, /spl middot//spl middot//spl middot/, n-1, and constraint length /spl nu/ up to 8) with good performance. Many of these codes improve the free distance and (or) weight spectra over previously reported codes with the same parameters. The tabulated codes are found by an exhaustive (or a random) search.