A method and apparatus for increasing the data rate and providing antenna diversity using multiple transmit antennas utilize a set of bits of a digital signal to generate a codeword. Delay elements may be provided in antenna output channels, or, with suitable code construction, delay may be omitted. n signals represent n symbols of a codeword are transmitted with n different transmit antennas. At the receiver, the noisy received sequence is decoded. The parallel transmission and channel coding enables an increase the data rate over previous techniques, and recovery even under fading conditions. The channel coding may be concatenated with error correction codes under appropriate conditions.