[Discuss-gnuradio] lost bytes and reed-solomon

[Brett L. Trotter]

I'm working on a self-educational project to replace the simple CRC in
the tunnel apparatus with a very heavy reed-solomon encoding for very
lossy and low-bandwidth links. One thought just occurred to me.
Originally, I was going to group up all of my data in 127 byte blocks,
r/s encode it with a 255,127, and just shove each 255 byte block into a
new payload string which would basically be twice as long with reed
solomon parity stuff every other 127/128 bytes from each respective
block and then just grab each 255 bytes and run them through the decoder
on the receive and do the opposite, shoving each decoded 127 bytes into
a decoded payload.

But the thought was, what if a byte is completely obliterated- then
everything would be shifted over one (or more) and my groupings wouldn't
align so I'd be looking in the wrong places for parity and not know that
there was a total deletion rather than just a corruption? Is there any
way to prevent/identify this case, or can it even happen?