This paper presents a simplified, highly spectrally efficient space-time communication processing method for high-scattering wireless environments using multi-element antenna arrays (MEAs) at both transmit and receive sites. The method maps a user's bit stream to a vector of independently modulated equal bit-rate signal components that are simultaneously transmitted in the same band. A detection algorithm similar to multiuser detection is used to detect the signal components in white Gaussian noise (WGN). For a large number of antennas, the method offers no more than about 40% more capacity than a simple architecture. A testbed operating at 1.9 GHz with up to 16 QAM transmitters and 16 receive antennas is described. Under ideal conditions at 18 dB SNR, the theoretical spectral efficiency is 36 bit/s/Hz, while the Shannon capacity is 71.1 bit/s/Hz. The method uses a vertical BLAST (V-BLAST) architecture with no coding, which is simpler than the diagonal BLAST (D-BLAST) architecture. The V-BLAST architecture is shown to achieve a significant fraction of the bit rates of the D-BLAST approach. The paper also discusses the capacity performance for large numbers of antennas, showing that the vertical architecture's capacity grows linearly with the number of antennas and provides an interesting fraction of the capacity of the more complex diagonal architecture. The paper concludes that the vertical architecture, although less efficient than the diagonal, can provide some interesting capacities and is suitable for practical implementations. The results show that the diagonal architecture has an advantage of about 40% over the vertical architecture at 18 dB SNR. The paper also discusses the performance of the vertical architecture in various scenarios, including the effects of practical impairments such as filter rolloff, timing error, phase noise, carrier frequency offset, and DC offset. The paper concludes that the vertical architecture is a flexible and simple method for achieving high spectral efficiency in wireless communication.This paper presents a simplified, highly spectrally efficient space-time communication processing method for high-scattering wireless environments using multi-element antenna arrays (MEAs) at both transmit and receive sites. The method maps a user's bit stream to a vector of independently modulated equal bit-rate signal components that are simultaneously transmitted in the same band. A detection algorithm similar to multiuser detection is used to detect the signal components in white Gaussian noise (WGN). For a large number of antennas, the method offers no more than about 40% more capacity than a simple architecture. A testbed operating at 1.9 GHz with up to 16 QAM transmitters and 16 receive antennas is described. Under ideal conditions at 18 dB SNR, the theoretical spectral efficiency is 36 bit/s/Hz, while the Shannon capacity is 71.1 bit/s/Hz. The method uses a vertical BLAST (V-BLAST) architecture with no coding, which is simpler than the diagonal BLAST (D-BLAST) architecture. The V-BLAST architecture is shown to achieve a significant fraction of the bit rates of the D-BLAST approach. The paper also discusses the capacity performance for large numbers of antennas, showing that the vertical architecture's capacity grows linearly with the number of antennas and provides an interesting fraction of the capacity of the more complex diagonal architecture. The paper concludes that the vertical architecture, although less efficient than the diagonal, can provide some interesting capacities and is suitable for practical implementations. The results show that the diagonal architecture has an advantage of about 40% over the vertical architecture at 18 dB SNR. The paper also discusses the performance of the vertical architecture in various scenarios, including the effects of practical impairments such as filter rolloff, timing error, phase noise, carrier frequency offset, and DC offset. The paper concludes that the vertical architecture is a flexible and simple method for achieving high spectral efficiency in wireless communication.