Multi-antenna transmission control presented herein involves generating a set of virtual channel realizations at the transmitter that shares the same second-order statistics as the actual channel realizations observed for a targeted receiver. By making the control-related quantities of interest at the transmitter depend on the long-term statistics of the channel, the actual channel realizations are not needed for transmission control, e.g., for accurate Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) preceding. As such, the use of virtual channel realizations enables transmission control that approaches the “closed-loop” channel capacity that would be provided by full feedback of the (instantaneous) actual channel realizations, without requiring the overhead signaling burden that attends full feedback.