Studies of digital transmission over typical urban and suburban mobile channels using simulations that employ a local area model for the time varying mobile channel impulse response are discussed. The digital transmission techniques of coherently detected and differentially coherent detected versions of quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), Gaussian minimum shift keying (GMSK), and coherently detected binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) over example mobile channels are presented. Two measures of performance are considered; the mean bit error ratio (and irreducible bit error ratio), which is used to compare the robustness of the various modulation methods to delay spread, and the outage probability, which provides a measure of the overall transmission quality as would be perceived by a user. Emphasis is placed on results obtained for GMSK, which is the modulation scheme to be employed in the Pan-European digital cellular mobile system. The effects of RMS delay spread on the mean bit error ratio, mean irreducible bit error ratio, and probability of outage are considered for different channel types.>