For high data rates satellite systems, where multiple carriers are frequency division multiplexed with a slight overlap, the overall spectral efficiency is limited. This work applies highly overlapped carriers for satellite broadcast and broadband scenarios to achieve higher spectral efficiency. Spectrally efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM) compresses subcarrier spacing to increase the spectral efficiency at the expense of orthogonality violation. SEFDM systems performance degrades compared to orthogonal signals, unless efficient interference cancellation is used. Turbo equalisation with interference cancellation is implemented to improve receiver performance for variable coding, compression and modulation/constellation proposals that may be applied in satellite communications settings. Such parameters may be set to satisfy pre‐defined spectral efficiency values for a given quality index or associated application. Assuming low‐density parity check coded data, the work proposes two approaches to receiver design: a simple matched filter approach and an approach utilising an iterative interference cancellation structure specially designed for SEFDM. Mathematical models and simulations studies are presented indicating promising gains to be achieved for SEFDM transmission with advanced transceiver architectures at the cost of increased complexity at the receiver.