Systems and techniques for improved error detection in data communication. A sending station encodes unencoded data to create an encoded message and passes the encoded data to transmission elements for transmission to a destination receiver. At the same time, error detection is performed using copies of the unencoded data and the encoded message. The encoded message is decoded using a decoding procedure identical to that to be used by the destination receiver. The copy of the unencoded data is compared to the decoded copy of the encoded message, and if the copy of the unencoded data does not match the decoded copy, the presence of an error is identified and error recovery procedures are performed.