Some subfield codes from MDS codes (Q6167298)

The authors give a construction of subfield codes from a family of MDS codes by using group characters and trace representations. In Subsection 2.3 the construction of the investigated subfield codes is explained. (This construction itself is actually due to \textit{C. Ding} and \textit{Z. Heng} [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 65, No. 8, 4715--4729 (2019; Zbl 1432.94166)]. The main results of this paper are written in Theorem 3.1 and Theorem 3.2, where the authors give the construction of an almost optimal binary linear code. An \([n,k,d]\) code is called almost optimal if an \([n, k + 1, d],\) or \([n, k, d + 1],\) or \([n-1, k, d]\) code is optimal.