A radio communication system for enabling control of a modulation scheme following variation in the propagation channel and control of a coding rate in a small amount of delay and arithmetic operation. In order to attain the object explained above, a transmitter station and a receiver station use in common the information of the maximum number of bits used for communication of each symbol. The transmitter station generates codeword by previously encoding the communication signal with the code having sufficient error correcting capability, assigns, to each symbol, the codeword to result in the maximum number of bits per symbol, and modulates and transmits the bits using the modulation scheme in which the number of bits per symbol is equal to or less than the maximum number of bits per symbol. Meanwhile, the receiver station demodulates, for each symbol, the bits with the modulation scheme, in which the number of bits per symbol is larger as the propagation channel quality is higher, among the modulation schemes in which the number of bits per symbol is less than the maximum number of bits per symbol and summarizes the demodulation results and executes the decoding process by adding the signal of zero likelihood to restore the shortage when the total sum of the number of bits per symbol in the modulation scheme used for the demodulation becomes equal to or larger than the predetermined value.