RANGE: SSB vs AM

[2M Guy]

You must have one hell of an antenna or are high as hell.

 

[Carl]

4 element

 

[Mr Clean]

With no skip I would say I can talk twice as far groundwave with same power on some days

 

[N8YX]

A tenfold increase is a bit much. Maybe four of five.

The actual figure is 6dB (or 4x).

Assume a 100w AM signal; 100% modulation. 50w of that is carrier; 25w in each sideband. Suppress the carrier and filter out the unwanted sideband. Then increase amplification of the remaining sideband signal to the point where the PA is loaded as it was when transmitting the AM RF envelope.

You'll see a fourfold increase in 'talk power'. Additionally, the PA runs a bit cooler as the duty cycle of an SSB waveform is lower than that of its AM (or FM) counterpart.

SSB also has an advantage over AM in that multipath distortion is significantly reduced. Those of us who into SWLing will encounter this aggravation at times; a sure-fire cure is to switch to SSB and listen to one of the station's sidebands. (Another trick that works - if your receiver has a narrow AM filter and passband tuning - is to adjust the PBT so the filter bandpass centers on one or the other sideband.)