In the design of future broadcasting and news gathering applications in Ka Band satellite communication systems, propagation impairments have an important impact. Their consideration with a traditional approach leads to high fixed link budget margins. It is nevertheless possible to adapt the system depending on attenuation fluctuations, especially for uplink. Among these techniques, the paper presents first the use of spatial diversity for gateways design applied to a broadcasting uplink. The case of a news gathering uplink is then considered and the use of a modulation/coding schemes switch is proposed with a new evaluation approach of the resulting system availability.