Abstract-This paper investigates the performance of M -ary Amplitude-Phase Shift Keying (APSK) digital modulation over typical nonlinear satellite channels. The effect of the satellite nonlinearity is studied, and distortion pre-and post-compensation techniques for coded APSK are presented. Moreover, clock timing, signal amplitude and carrier phase recovery schemes are discussed. For the latter, a new class of non turbo decoder-aided closed-loop phase synchronizers featuring good performance and low complexity is studied. Finally, an end-to-end coded APSK system simulator inclusive of the satellite channel model and synchronization sub-systems is discussed and its performance compared to standard trellis-coded QAM concatenated with Reed-Solomon codes, showing a remarkable gain in both power and spectral efficiency. Coded APSK, recently selected for the new standard -DVB-S2-for digital video broadcasting and interactive broadband satellite services [1], is shown to represent a power-and spectral-efficient solution for satellite nonlinear channels.