Conventional-generalized spatial modulation (C-GSM) is an N T Â N R multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) spatial modulation (SM) scheme that transmits the same complex amplitude/phase modulation symbol from multiple active transmit antennas. By using two active transmit antennas during a transmission interval, C-GSM is capable of achieving high spectral efficiencies. However, as the size of the signal constellation/domain increases, the minimum Euclidean distances (ED) between the symbols decrease. Hence, this leads to a degradation of the average bit error rate (ABER) performance of the scheme.Hence, motivated to improve the error performance of C-GSM schemes, first, this study proposes a new scheme called Golden codeword-based generalized spatial modulation (GCW-GSM), which combines C-GSM and the Golden code to take advantage of the benefits of both while avoiding their drawbacks. The proposed scheme uses conventional quadrature amplitude modulation (C-QAM), and it is investigated over Rayleigh frequency-flat fading channels with additive white Gaussian noise. Second, a closed-form expression of the theoretical average bit error probability of the proposed GCW-GSM scheme is formulated. Compared to simulation results, it proves to be increasingly tight at high signal-to-noise ratio values. Finally, the proposed scheme performance over the Rayleigh-frequency-flat fading channel is compared to that over the Rician channel. An improvement in the error performance of 6 dB with spectral efficiency of 10 bits=s=Hz is seen in 4 Â 4 C-16QAM GCW-GSM over 4 Â 4 C-256QAM conventional-spatial modulation and 4 Â 4 C-256QAM C-GSM schemes at a bit error rate (BER) of 1 Â 10 À5 . The 4 Â 4 C-16QAM GCW-GSM scheme exhibits an improvement in the error performance of 2:9 dB with spectral efficiency of 10 bits=s=Hz over the 4 Â 4 C-64QAM conventional quadrature spatial modulation scheme at a BER of 1 Â 10 À5 . Finally, the 4 Â 4 16-QAM GCW-GSM under Rayleigh fading has a performance gain of 3 dB over 4 Â 4 16-QAM GCW-GSM under Rician fading with a Rician K factor of 3.