This note explains the method used by Davey and MacKay to set the non-zero entries in low-density parity-check codes over GF(q), and gives explicit prescriptions.
The software used for exhaustive search is available from here (hzFFTe.p).
Matthew Davey's software which makes random assignments and ranks them is available from here (hzFFTe.p).
The tar file containing the program outputs is here (hz.tar).
This work was supported by a faculty partnership award from IBM Zurich Research labs.
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