Based on improved optical carrier suppressed double sideband modulation with 60 GHz repetitive frequency, a full‐duplex radio‐over‐fiber transport system using a single source at central office was proposed and demonstrated. Carrier suppressed double sideband optical signal was generated by using an optical phase modulator and dense‐wavelength‐division‐multiplexing technique, as well as an additional external amplitude modulator for loading baseband downlink data to one first‐order sideband. A dense‐wavelength‐division‐multiplexer was used to separate the two first‐order sidebands; the lower sideband was used to carry 5 Gbit/s downstream data, whereas the upper sideband was sent to base station for reuse of modulating upstream data. The limitation of chromatic dispersion is greatly reduced due to that only one sideband is modulated. Therefore, the system of bidirectional transmission shows cost‐efficient configuration and good performance over 80 km delivery with less than 1.5 dB power penalty. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 51: 1473–1476, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.24361