On the existence of symmetric skew balanced starters for odd prime powers.

Strong starters and skew starters have been widely used in various combinatorial designs. In particular skew balanced starters and symmetric skew balanced starters are crucially used in the construction of completely balanced Howell rotations. Let n = 2(m)k + 1 be an odd prime power where m >= 2 and k is an odd number. The existence of symmetric skew balanced starters for GF(n) has been proved for m >= 2 and k != 1,3,9. In this paper, we present a new approach which gives an uniform proof of the existence of symmetric skew balanced starters for all m >= 2 and k >=3.