The Basic lessons · Station assembly, practice and safety · B-003-012

Mastering SSB: Gain, Linearity, and Bandwidth

Learn how to set your microphone gain and speech processing correctly to avoid distorting your voice or interfering with other stations. Understand why Single Sideband (SSB) requires linear amplifiers and how to calculate the exact frequency your signal occupies.

This lesson is part of SignalPrep Pro. The subsection's 11 exam questions are free to practise: practise B-003-012.

What this subsection asks

• What may happen if an SSB transmitter is operated with the microphone gain set too high?
• What may happen if an SSB transmitter is operated with too much speech processing?
• What is the term for the average power during one RF cycle, at the crest of the modulation envelope?
• What is the usual bandwidth of an amateur radio single-sideband signal?
• Why does the power amplifier of the SSB transmitter need to be linear?
• What is one advantage of carrier suppression in a double sideband voice transmission?
• What does overmodulation do to a single-sideband signal?
• How should the microphone gain control be adjusted for voice operation on a single-sideband transmitter?
• The purpose of a balanced modulator in an SSB transmitter is to:
• Your SSB transmitter is set to operate lower sideband at 7100 kHz. With a single 1000 Hz tone as modulation, at which frequency is RF transmitted?
• The automatic level control (ALC) in an SSB transmitter: