Log Base 2 of 3 = ~1.5849625, so that's the limit to how well you can pack three-state values into bits of data.
For something more practical, you can pack five three-state values within a byte because 3^5 = 243, which is smaller than 256. To unpack, you divide and modulo by 3 five separate times. This encodes data in bytes at 1.6 bits per symbol.
But the packing of 5 symbols into a byte was not done here. Instead, they packed 4 symbols into a byte to reduce computational complexity (no unpacking needed)
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Log Base 2 of 3 = ~1.5849625, so that's the limit to how well you can pack three-state values into bits of data.
For something more practical, you can pack five three-state values within a byte because 3^5 = 243, which is smaller than 256. To unpack, you divide and modulo by 3 five separate times. This encodes data in bytes at 1.6 bits per symbol.
But the packing of 5 symbols into a byte was not done here. Instead, they packed 4 symbols into a byte to reduce computational complexity (no unpacking needed)