Abstract: We experimentally demonstrated a digital learned-filter mitigation scheme for semiconductor optical amplifier-induced nonlinear distortion of single-polarisation 32 GBd 16QAM and 64QAM signals in a back-to-back configuration. 2023 The Author(s), Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are typically not recommended for amplification of coherent signals due the gain and phase distortions introduced by them. However, in the presence of a saturating holding beam (HB), these distortions can be minimised, with a trade off in the achievable gain. In this letter, we present a detailed experimental analysis of identifying the HB parameters for , In the 16QAM back-to-back configuration, although the single SOA case outperforms the OPC-NLC case in the low power region due to (a) the larger OSNR difference between the two and (b) low distortions, superiority reverses at a larger output power where the nonlinear distortion per SOA grows with increasing OSNR., The aim of this study is to satisfy the SOA characteristics of both low noise and high output, making it possible to develop an SOA which satisfies the required characteristics for a sin-gle-channel amplifier. SOAs with low noise figure and high output characteristics have already been reported in the literature 3)., Amplification of single channel and three Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) channels with 16 and 64QAM modulated signals is demonstrated using an SOA with holding beam in the non-transparency wavelength to minimize phase distortion. We demonstrate an optical gain of 10 dB for single channel and for each channel in WDM operation. We also show that, the performance with holding beam can , Again, notice that this type of distortion happens at low frequency. From a practical point of view, a board and system level designer only needs to be aware of this issue when selecting their amplifier, as they cannot change the internal layout of the amplifier..