Looking for a little clarification on FEC.....

Would a HD or Digital FM radio receiver in a standard automobile employ a FEC decoder? The signal is digital (obviously) and FEC to my understanding would be applied to cases where there is a low tolerance for longer propagation i.e voice communications...in this case it is music/voice. Digital FM radio is simplex in nature and there is no channel back to the transmitter. Does this all sound reasonable? Non-RF folks at work were arguing, and my take was that it obviously would but then I couldn't justify it. I was under the impression that any digital signal would employ some sort of error correction or detection but was unsure if in this case it would indeed be FEC or another method.

TIA

-Tass

 

Yes, HD radio uses FEC and OFDM modulation.

The FEC coding, namely Viterbi punctured convolutional encoding, increases the robustness of the signal in the presence of noise and fading. The interleaving provides both time and frequency diversity that also help improve reception in loss-of-signal conditions.

https://www.electronicdesign.com/communications/high-definition-radio-its-new-wave