Land mobile satellite communication systems at Ka/K band (30/20 GHz) are attracting more and more attention to researchers because of its frequency band availability and the possibility of using small earth stations and satellite antennas for the systems. However, the Ka/K-band communications also give significant challenges in the system design due to severe channel impairments expected from the satellite links. In this paper, K-band channel characteristics are studied and compared with those at L band. The channel is modeled as Rayleigh multipath fading with the line-of-sight (LOS) component following a lognormal distribution. The first and second-order statistics of the fading channel are studied. Dual-space diversity reception is investigated to combat the flat channel fading. The bit error rate performance of coherent binary phase shift keying (BPSK) with ideal bit and carrier phase synchronization over the fading channel at K band is evaluated theoretically and verified by computer simulations in the case with and without diversity reception.