Arithmetic-progression-weighted subsequence sums

Let G be an abelian group, let s be a sequence of terms s ₁, s ₂, …, s _n ∈ G not all contained in a coset of a proper subgroup of G, and let W be a sequence of n consecutive integers. Let $$W \odot S = \left\{ {w_1 s_1 + \cdots + w_n s_n :w_i a term of W,w_i \ne w_j for i \ne j} \right\},$$ which is a particular kind of weighted restricted sumset. We show that |W ⊙ S| ≥ min{|G| ? 1, n}, that W ⊙ S = G if n ≥ |G| + 1, and also characterize all sequences S of length |G| with W ⊙ S ≠ G. This result then allows us to characterize when a linear equation $$a_1 x_1 + \cdots + a_r x_r \equiv \alpha mod n,$$ where α, a ₁, …, a _r ∈ ? are given, has a solution (x ₁, …, x _r ) ∈ ? ^r modulo n with all x _i distinct modulo n. As a second simple corollary, we also show that there are maximal length minimal zero-sum sequences over a rank 2 finite abelian group $G \cong C_{n_1 } \oplus C_{n_2 }$ (where n ₁ |n ₂ and n ₂ ≥ 3) having k distinct terms, for any k ε 3, min{n ₁ + 1, exp(G)}]. Indeed, apart from a few simple restrictions, any pattern of multiplicities is realizable for such a maximal length minimal zero-sum sequence.