—In this paper, the performance of signaling strategies with high peak-to-average power ratio is analyzed in both coherent and noncoherent fading channels. Two modulation schemes, namely on-off phase-shift keying (OOPSK) and on-off frequency-shift keying (OOFSK), are considered. The optimal detector structures are identified and analytical expressions for the error probabilities are obtained for arbitrary constellation sizes. Numerical techniques are employed to compute the error rates. It is concluded that increasing the peakedness of the signals results in reduced error rates for a given power level and hence equivalently improves the energy efficiency for fixed error probabilities.