We propose a simple class of encoding/decoding techniques which can be used to improve the information outage rate of certain multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Gains in outage rate can be achieved at low to moderate signal to noise ratios in MIMO systems which have fewer receive antennas than transmit antennas. This performance improvement is due to extra ``virtual'' receive antennas which are created with low complexity signal processing. A simple space-time block code system using virtual receive antennas is also investigated.