This unusual usage of FEC redundancy is the primary innovation that differentiates ALE from previous selective calling systems which either decoded a call or failed to decode due to noise or interference. A binary outcome of "Good enough" or not gave no way of automatically choosing between two channels, both of which are currently good enough for minimum communications. The redundancy-based scoring inherent in ALE thus allows for selecting the "best" available channel and (in more advanced ALE nodes) using all decoded traffic over some time window to sort channels into a list of decreasing probability-to-contact, significantly reducing co-channel interference to other users as well as dramatically decreasing the time needed to successfully link with the target node.