In wireless asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), the affect of a channel bit error varies significantly from the header to various payloads of a cell. Hence, to make the best available use of the limited channel coding redundancy, the paper proposes a two-rate punctured convolutional code (PCC) scheme with flexible unequal error protection (UEP) to apply to wireless ATM cell. In this paper, their performance on Gaussian, Rayleigh and Ricean fading channels is deeply analyzed further, which shows PCC schemes make significant reductions in cell loss rate (CLR) and good balances for CLR and the payload bit error rate (BER). The paper contains a detailed study of the effect of the code and channel parameters and the contrasting performance of hard and soft decisions on the received symbols. The study clearly highlights the need for soft decisions and channel state information (CSI) to extract the maximum benefit from Viterbi decoding on a fading channel.