This paper presents a new compression scheme for single channel ECG, by delineating each ECG cycle. It uses multirate processing to normalize the varying period beats, followed by amplitude normalization. These beats are coded using vector quantization, with each beat being treated as a vector of uniform dimension. The average amplitude scale factor and the average beat period are made available at the decoder, along with the codebook of period and amplitude normalized beat vectors, to facilitate reconstruction of the signal. The actual beat period and the actual maximum amplitude of the beat are sent to the decoder by DPCM. It achieves a high quality approximation at less than 30 bits per second, with a compression ratio of around 100:1 to 200:1. To assess the technique properly we have evaluated two measures of error. Finally, the merits and demerits of the technique are discussed.