Practical Reed-Solomon for Programmers
Recently I was doing some work decoding the new Galileo High Accuracy Service data. In short, this new service will allow Galileo (“European GPS”) users to achieve decimeter-level accuracy, which is nice. This “HAS” data is transmitted highly redundantly by making good use of Reed-Solomon encoding.
To work with this data, I attempted to learn more about Reed-Solomon and I found almost all explanations were useless to me - oodles of advanced math, but no guidance of how to use R-S in practice. And in fact, quite a lot of the math-heavy pages turned out to get practical details wrong.
The math behind Reed-Solomon is indeed very pretty, and I can understand why many explanations start with telling users about lovely Galois fields. This page meanwhile will focus on things you really need to know.
This article will not turn you into an expert on Reed-Solomon. It will however allow you to understand and use any R-S codes you have to work with. In addition, you’ll learn what R-S can and can not do, and how it relates to other error correcting systems. Finally, with this understanding, the more math heavy explanations might become more accessible.
