MISO with spatial multiplexing

Can someone clarify this for me.

A transmitter with M antennas is used with spatial multplexing. On the receiver end only a single antenna is used to pick-up the signal but with M demodulating chains. Will this work or should the number of physical antenna be equal to or greater than the number of transmitting antennas?

Also can the above be used with receive diversity(Maximal ratio combining)?

What I am looking for is a way to transmit a signal with minimum number of receiver antennas and reliable reception with high payload over rayleigh fading channels (Indoor reception). What I have in mind is a combination of spatial multiplexing (or is higher order modulation a better choice) with LDPC coding and OFDM modulation with receive diversity(MRC).

As I understand it, you need at least the same amount of receive antennas for full spatial multiplexing. In your case you could only make use of transmit diversity.

From what I understand multiple receive antennas are needed so that each of the spatial streams will have sufficiently different spatial signatures. I wonder if one can use a single receive antenna and make random changes to the signal (amplitude and phase shifting) like digital beamforming to simulate multiple receive paths?

I found this very informative table for MIMO based on number of transmit and receive antennas and their combinations. It is under the sub-heading "WiMax four antenna Matrix C mode"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX_MIMO