  Trellis-coded modulation (TCM) is a power and bandwidth efficient digital
transmission scheme which offers very low structural delay of the data stream.
Classical TCM uses a signal constellation of twice the cardinality compared to
an uncoded transmission with one bit of redundancy per PAM symbol, i.e.,
application of codes with rates $\frac{n-1}{n}$ when $2^{n}$ denotes the
cardinality of the signal constellation.
  Recently published work allows rate adjustment for TCM by means of puncturing
the convolutional code (CC) on which a TCM scheme is based on.
  In this paper it is shown how punctured TCM-signals transmitted over
intersymbol interference (ISI) channels can favorably be decoded. Significant
complexity reductions at only minor performance loss can be achieved by means
of reduced state sequence estimation.
