The meteor-burst (MB) channel is characterized b y its availability in time bursts and the exponential decay of the received signal within the majority of these bursts. There are diflerent scheme for data transmission over this channel. Adaptive-rate ( A R ) transmission is known to provide the best throughput among all schemes f o r systems operating over this channel. I n this paper it is shown that b y using coding and interleaving a significant improvement in the throughput is feasible. In particular, the scheme is more effective for links with small decay constant such as those operating at the high frequency range of the meteor-burst transmission or those operating at shod distances.