In this paper, the downlink of the multicast based spatial modulation systems is investigated. Specifically, physical layer multicasting is introduced to increase the number of access users and to improve the communication rate of the spatial modulation system in which only single radio frequency chain is activated in each transmission. To minimize the bit error rate (BER) of the multicast based spatial modulation system, a joint optimizing algorithm of antenna selection and multicast precoding is proposed. Firstly, the joint optimization is tr...