AbstractThis article proposes automatic power control (APC)‐erbium‐doped fiber amplifier (EDFA)‐based scintillation‐suppressed photodetection in satellite optical communication (SOC). It is mainly based on the dynamic gain characteristic of APC‐EDFA. In order to improve the performance, high pass filter (HPF) and Manchester on‐off‐keying (M‐OOK) are introduced as supplemental methods. The proposed scheme is evaluated experimentally under various turbulence channel strengths. The experimental results show that the scintillation effect is suppressed using APC‐EDFA with pump power reduction compared to gain saturation, and an approximate 5.83 dB signal‐to‐noise ratio improvement is obtained compared to adaptive threshold decision with instantaneous turbulence channel state information under a scintillation index of 0.2990.