In this paper the trade-off between time diversity and the inter-carrier interference (ICI) in an OFDM based MC-CDMA system is discussed. Our approach is to partially shift each spectrum of an OFDM symbol at the transmitter by using different phase shifts in the time domain at different antennas after the OFDM modulation. The summary signal at the receiver has a wider Doppler spectrum as the result of different uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels. This leads to an artificially increased selective time channel transfer function, which is more favorable for the channel decoder at the receiver. The trade-off between Doppler diversity and ICI is found at about 9% maximum Doppler spread of the subcarrier distance for flat fading channels and frequency selective fading channel models. The distance to the independent Rayleigh channel bound by applying an MMSE detector is less than 2 dB for convolutional coding and about 2 dB for turbo coding at a BER of 10/sup -3/ for flat fading channels. For frequency selective fading channels this approaches to less than 1 dB to the independent Rayleigh channel bound.