A subscriber station is capable of encoding a bandwidth request message. The subscriber station includes a controller and a transmitter coupled to the controller. The transmitter includes a linear channel encoder and a Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) modulation block. The channel encoder uses a generator matrix comprising alphabets from Galois field (GF) (2). Each column of the generator matrix belongs to a twelve dimensional subspace and wherein the code generated using the generator matrix has a minimum hamming distance no greater than thirty.