AbstractA joint scheme combining error‐control coding (ECC) with complex‐field coding (CFC) is proposed for space–time communications through flat or frequency‐selective fading multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) channels. It is shown that the diversity gain of this joint coding scheme is the product of the free distance of the ECC, the complex‐field block encoder size, and the number of receiving antennas, which is computationally prohibitive to achieve using ECC alone. The decoding complexity with the proposed iterative decoder is comparable to a system without CFC. Numerical simulations for perfectly interleaved and HIPERLAN channels with both single and multiple antennas show great potential of the proposed joint coding scheme. Copyri