The coding gain of

-ary communication systems using orthogonal alphabets have been shown to improve by using concatenated orthogonal codes, each of length

. In the receiver, a two-stage MF/correlator and ML detection are utilized to provide the final decision through only

comparisons instead of the

comparisons normally required. A coding gain of 8 dB for

is obtained with

only. Higher coding gain is obtained with higher order concatenation.