It is shown that a high-radix fast Fourier transform (FFT) with generator

over GF

, where

is a Fermat prime, can be used for encoding and decoding of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes of length

. Such an RS decoder is considerably faster than a decoder using the usual radix 2 FFT. This technique applies most ideally to a 16-error-correcting, 256-symbol RS code of 8 bits being considered currently for space communication applications. This special code can be encoded and decoded rapidly using a high-radix FFT algorithm over GF

.