Welcome to the world of SSB.
Everything may be fine.
Turn compression up to about 10 and you should see a bump up in output power.?
With SSB, many/most external wattmeters are not fast enough to catch the true peaks of the transmitted voice waveform.? And on top of that, the peak-to-average power ratio of transmitted voice is very high, so an average-reading power meter will show only a small percentage of the actual peak output power.? Turning compression on increases the average power, at the expense of some distortion.
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The power peaks on QMX will be 4.5W (if your QMX does 5W, and your mic gain is set properly), due to the 90% drive level default setting Hans described.? You won't be able to see those on a power meter, but should be able to verify with an oscilloscope.
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Stan KC7XE?
