The application of Reed-Solomon codes in slow frequency-hopped systems has been extensively studied. Earlier investigations assumed an infinite interleaving length and considered partial-band noise jammers only. This paper extends previous efforts by analyzing the effect of finite interleaving length and the impact of band multitone jammers. We also explain why two-threshold (2T) erasure-insertion methods (EIM) are needed and examine their performance. Numerical results are presented to compare the effectiveness of EIM's and jammer types and to study the relationships among the hop rate, the interleaver size, and the code rate. The use of 2T EIM's necessitates the estimation of several additional channel and signal parameters. Simple and effective estimation algorithms are provided as well. Index Terms-Errors-and-erasures decoding, frequency-hop, jamming, RS code. I. INTRODUCTION A FAST frequency-hopped (FFH) system employs both frequency and time diversity and enjoys the advantage of having a "coding gain." On the other hand, to acquire a satisfactory antijam (AJ) capability, a slow frequency-hopped (SFH) system usually has to add an extra mechanism of protection-that is where forward error-control (FEC) coding comes into play. Stark [1] compared the performance among repetition codes, convolutional codes, and Reed-Solomon (RS) codes for SFH systems.-ary frequency-shift keying (MFSK) or differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) are two practical modulation schemes that most frequently go with RS-coded FH signals. An excellent review of the application of RS codes to SFH/MFSK systems can be found in [10]. Side information, which offers the information about the received symbol's reliability, can help increase the error-correcting capability of a given code. Stark [1] showed that the use of binary side information about the presence of a jammer to determine whether a received symbol should be erased can enhance the error-control capability of RS codes. Hagenauer and Lutz [4] used channel state and erasure information derived from received waveform's amplitude to improve the performance of a mobile satellite system. In [6], test symbols were utilized as a reference of symbol reliability in various