Stratified products of hyperelliptic curves, and geometric Goppa codes

The purpose of this paper is to extend the results of the first author on construction of fairly long geometric Goppa codes over $F_q$ ($q=p^\nu$ and $\nu>1$ is even) with rather good parameters to the case of finite fields $F_q$ consisting of $q=p^\nu$ elements, where $\nu>1$ is an odd integer.
The work was supported by Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.
The first author was partially supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, grant 94-01-01206-a.