A study of the coherent optical CPFSK communication system employing Reed-Solomon codes is reported. The impact of the laser phase noise, the IF additive noise, and selection of the optimum code rate are investigated. With a suitable coding scheme, the receiver sensitivity will be remarkably unproved. The improvement is calculated for various modulation indices and the product of laser linewidth and bit duration (ΔνΤ). The results show that by applying a (255,179) Reed-Solomon code, when the laser linewidth is fixed (ΔνΤ = 2%) and modulation index m equals 1, the receiver sensitivity can be improved by more than 16 dB.