Discussion 1. Signal to Noise ratio is negative when noise power is larger than signal power.

In this case uncoded Bit Error Rate(BER) is smaller than the BER for coded systems. When we consider a coded system, the transmitted message is always longer in bit length than the actual message. This also explains the higher BER in coded systems in a negative SNR case. For positive SNR, a coded system has a lower BER than an uncoded one. In this case the signal power is larger than noise power and a larger number of bits reduces the error. In this case, in a coded system, BER reaches zero more sooner compared to an uncoded system.

In summarized form: (-) SNR (+) SNR High BER for coded system Low BER for coded system Low BER for uncoded system High BER for uncoded system

2. Selecting a Hamming Scheme

The Hamming distance between two codewords is defined as the number of differing bit positions between the code words. If the transmission medium is reliable, the number of differing bit positions between the transmitted code word and the received code word is expected to be small and error occurrence as chunks is considered very unlikely.

When selecting the scheme, the following facts should be taken into consideration. 1. Hamming distance should be larger than the number of correctable errors. 2. Number of parity bits should be consistent with the bandwidth of the channel.

Having larger (n,k) values for the Hamming code makes it possible to correct more errors. However the hardware complexity and bandwidth requirements become higher and vise versa.