A method and system that increases transmit diversity gain in a wireless communication system. The system includes a transmitter with 2^N transmit antennas, where N is greater than one, and a receiver with one or more receive antenna. The transmitter includes N stages connected serially to each other. The first stage is a symbol level space-time transmit diversity encoder. Each of the next N-1 stages is a block level space-time transmit diversity encoder, for a total of N stages. The last stage is connected to the 2^N antennas. The transmitter generates pairs of symbols in a form X₁ and X₂, The pairs of symbols are encoded by the first stage to produce a 2¹2¹ output matrix C. Then, in each next block level stage n, the 2^n-12^n-1 output matrix of a previous stage is encoded to a 2ⁿ2ⁿ output matrix, until a final output matrix has 2^N rows of transmit symbols. The transmit symbols of the final output matrix are fed, in a left-to-right order, for each row, in a top-to-bottom order, to a corresponding different one of the 2^N transmit antennas. A transmit weight is applied to each transmit symbol before transmitting the transmit symbol.