A structured parity-check matrix H is proposed, wherein H is an expansion of a base matrix Hb and wherein Hb comprises a section Hb1 and a section Hb2, and wherein Hb2 comprises a first part comprising a column hb having an odd weight greater than 2, and a second part comprising matrix elements for row i, column j equal to 1 for i=j, 1 for i=j+1, and 0 elsewhere. The expansion of the base matrix Hb uses identical submatrices for 1s in each column of the second part H′b2, and the expansion uses paired submatrices for an even number of 1s in hb.