The invention is related to coding and decoding data, more particularly in microwave
radio link systems. According to the invention, the sequence of data to be encoded
at a transmitting end is split into at least two blocks, if the sequence is longer
than a first predetermined length M. The splitting is performed so that the length
first block is equal to the first predetermined length M. If the remaining sequence
is shorter than a second predetermined length N, the second block comprises all
of the remaining sequence. If the remaining sequence is longer than the second
predetermined length N, the length of the second block is found by subtracting
from the length of the remaining sequence the highest integer multiple of the second
predetermined length, and the rest of the sequence is split into blocks of length
N. If the sequence is shorter than the first predetermined length M, only one block
is produced, and the sequence is padded with dummy values to form a sequence of
length M. If the sequence is exactly M units long, the first and in that case the
only block comprises the whole sequence. The blocks are then separately encoded
with the desired coding function.
