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==Applications==
Concatenated codes were first implemented for [[deep space]] communication in the [[Voyager program]], which launched their first probe in 1977, but all images were transmitted with a Golay Code.<ref name="deep-space-codes">K. Andrews et al., ''The Development of Turbo and LDPC Codes for Deep-Space Applications'', Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 95, No. 11, Nov. 2007.</ref> Since then, concatenated codes became the workhorse for efficient error correction coding, and stayed so at least until the invention of [[turbo codes]] and [[LDPC codes]].
Typically, the inner code is not a block code but a soft-decision [[convolutional code|convolutional]] [[Viterbi decoder|Viterbi-decoded]] code with a short constraint length. For the outer code, a longer hard-decision block code, frequently [[Reed Solomon]] with 8-bit symbols, is selected. The larger symbol size makes the outer code more robust to [[error burst|burst error]]s that may occur due to channel impairments, and because erroneous output of the convolutional code itself is bursty. Additionally, an [[interleaving]] layer may be used that spreads burst errors across a wider range.
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