Forward error correction for an enhanced SARSAT distress message

This paper presents a proposed enhancement to the current SARSAT distress message that is backward-compatible with the existing local user terminals (LUT) (i.e., ground stations) receivers. Additional coding is appended to the current message to allow for better performance for the new LUTs, soft-decision decoding is used in the evaluation of the current and enhanced format. Performance results on the AWGN channel are presented. It is shown that near maximum-likelihood performance is achieved for the new code format.