Systems and methods for dual-carrier modulation (DCM) encoding and decoding for communication systems. Some embodiments comprise a DCM encoder for applying a pre-transmission function to at least one 16-QAM input symbol and mapping resulting transformed symbols onto at least one larger constellation prior to transmission. Some embodiments joint decode, by a DCM decoder, a predetermined number of received data elements and compute a set of log-likelihood ratio (LLR) values for at least eight bits from a resulting at least one transformed symbol.