The non-existence of some NMDS codes and the extremal sizes of complete (n,3)-arcs in PG(2,16)

The non-existence of $[29+h,3+h,26]_{16}$ and $[29+h,4+h,25]_{16}$ -codes, $hge 0$ , is proven. These results are obtained using geometrical methods, exploiting the equivalence between NMDS codes of dimension $3$ and $(n,3)$ -arcs in $PG(2,q)$ . Along the way the packing problem for complete $(n,3)$ -arcs in $PG(2,16)$ is solved, proving that $m_{3}(2,16)=28$ and $t_{3}(2,16)=15$ and that the complete $(28,3)$ -arc and the complete $(15,3)$ -arc are unique up to collineations.