The performance of frequency-hop spread-spectrum (FHSS) communication systems using hybrid automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) can be improved by combining current and prior transmissions at the receiver. Two methods for combining packets in systems that employ interleaving and Reed-Solomon (RS) coding are presented and analyzed for the partial-band interference channel. These methods use majority logic combining at the codeword level to make retransmission decisions. Bounded distance errors-and-erasures decoding and erasure generation by means of Viterbi's ratio threshold test (RTT) are incorporated in the analysis. Results of the analysis show that, with comparable packet error probabilities, the packet-combining schemes provide significant gains in throughput when compared with systems that do not employ combining.