A transmission policy is examined for frequency-hopped spread-spectrum random access communication systems, in which the retransmission of a blocked packet at each station is determined as a function of that station's own collision experience. For stability considerations and for channel throughout increase, the information packet is encoded by a Reed-Solomon code. An equilibrium analysis is employed to show that undesirable bistable behavior can be avoided if packets are rejected after a certain number of transmission attempts and the code rate is adjusted accordingly. The region of code rate and number of transmission attempts pairs that guarantees the network stability is investigated. The packet rejection probability, average packet delay, and maximum stable throughput are evaluated.