Extending two families of maximum rank distance codes

Abstract: In this paper we provide a large family of rank-metric codes, which contains properly the codes recently found by Longobardi and Zanella (2021) and by Longobardi, Marino, Trombetti and Zhou (2021). These codes are $\mathbb{F}{q^{2t}}$-linear of dimension $2$ in the space of linearized polynomials over $\mathbb{F}{q^{2t}}$, where $t$ is any integer greater than $2$, and we prove that they are maximum rank distance codes. For $t\ge 5$, we determine their equivalence classes and these codes turn out to be inequivalent to any other construction known so far, and hence they are really new.