The increasing prevalence of unmanned services in recent times demands efficient wireless communication schemes with stringent requirements of ultra-reliability and ultra-low latency. Recently, sparse vector coding (SVC), a short packet transmission method, was suggested for highly reliable and fast B5G communications. The key idea in SVC is to transform the packet information into a sparse vector of fewer non-zero positions. To further enhance the reliability, an enhanced SVC (ESVC) technique is proposed in which information is encoded in both non-zero locations of a sparse vector as well as symbols. In this paper, we explore the maximal ratio transmission (MRT) at the base station assuming ESVC as a short packet transmission. Computer-simulated results suggest that the block error rate (BLER) of a short packet decreases by increasing the number of transmitting antennas at the BS under realistic channel models. Results suggest that the proposed technique outperforms the conventional SVC-MRT by 2dB at a BLER of 10 −4 .