The authors describe TCMP, a novel modulation strategy for Rician fading channels that multiplexes a time domain pilot sequence with trellis-coded data to permit coherent detection. This technique is shown to provide remarkably robust performance in the presence of fading. It is also shown that, when choosing trellis codes for fading channels, time diversity is of greater important than asymptotic coding gain. The motivation for studying this strategy is to find signaling schemes for transmitting data at a 4.8 kb/s rate over a mobile satellite channel with 5-kHz channel spacing. >