Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) schemes are attractive in terms of bandwidth efficiency and offer a number of subchannels with different integrities via both Gaussian and Rayleigh-fading channels. Specifically, the 16-QAM phasor constellation has two, while the 64-QAM possesses three such subchannels, which become dramatically different via Rayleigh-fading channels. The analytically derived bit error rate (BER) formulae yield virtually identical curves with simulation results, exhibiting adequate BERs for the highest integrity subchannels of both 16-QAM and 64-QAM to be further reduced by forward error correction coding (FEC). However, the BERs of the lower integrity subchannels require fading compensation to reduce their values for FEC techniques to become effective. This property creates ground for a variety of carefully matched, embedded mobile transmission schemes of different complexities. The practical implementation of such an embedded scheme is demonstrated by a low-cost, low-complexity and low-consumption 50KBd mobile video telephone scheme offering adequate speech and image quality for channel SNRs in excess of about 20dB via Rayleigh-fading channels.