To overcome the shortcoming that the single-state channel modeling method cannot sufficiently reflect the practical propagation of satellite channel, a three-state Markov modeling method for land mobile satellite channel is presented. In particular, it is the first time to simulate the symbol error rate (SER) performance based on the presented channel model. Each state of the three-state Markov channel model obeys the Loo distribution with different parameters; while the state transition is modeled as Markov random process. The SER comparisons using the presented channel model are simulated independently for the intermediate tree shadowed scenario and suburban scenario in S band, elevation of 40° and quadrature phase shift keying(QPSK) modulation. The simulation results show that SER performance is mainly determined by the strength of the line-of-sight component. In case of heavy shadow, additional signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 3-5 dB is needed to compensate the SER loss. In addition, in order to achieve the same SER=0.01 performance, the intermediate tree shadowed scenario needs extra about 5 dB SNR compared to suburban scenario. The work is contributed to the research of satellite communication techniques and the engineering application therein.