Two designs of wideband compact MIMO antenna using printed dipoles are proposed in this paper. One is a three-port orthogonal polarization antenna and the other is a cube-six-port antenna. Measured results for the antennas show that they resonate at 2.6GHz and support a bandwidth of over 400MHz. The worst mutual coupling for the three-port orthogonal polarization antenna is kept under -20dB whereas that level of the cube-six-port antenna is -18dB. A number of experiments are conducted on MIMO systems with these compact antennas and linear antenna arrays. Measured data are analyzed to examine channel characteristics, such as cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) of eigenvalues. Furthermore, the effect of different antenna configurations on channel capacity is highlighted and discussed. A high data rate capacity can be achieved with the compact antennas, particularly from the cube-six-port variant. These antennas might be applied in actual MIMO systems in wireless communications.