There's a long history of this sort of thing. All communication with Galileo, for instance, was via the auxiliary transmitter intended to properly target the much bigger main transmitter; the main transmitter dish was damaged on launch.
As part of the measures to increase the efficiency of transmission, a new coder/decoder was developed to add about 2dB to the SNR to the transmitter.
It was called the Big Viterbi Decoder, or BVD for short. The noted information theorist Ed Posner, who was on the design team, quipped, "I've worked on hardware and on software for space systems, but this will be the first time I've worked on underwear."
