To utilize the spectrum efficiently, nine modulation and coding schemes had been specified in the EGPRS standard. This paper proposes a new closed-loop link adaptation by selecting the transmission mode according to the Rician channel k-factor. The proposed link adaptation incorporates only three identical modulated schemes due to the considerations of hardware complexity and implementation feasibility. Applying the proposed method to a real channel measured at urban Taipei city, the simulation results show that the adaptive scheme outperforms the fixed mode transmission by 58% while the block error rate is maintained below 2 10 − .