In this paper, we investigate the pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) decomposition and the spectral efficiency of duobinary continuous phase modulation (CPM), where duo- binary CPM represents a ternary CPM whose symbols are generated using a duobinary encoder. We show that this precoder ensures a higher spectral efficiency compared with binary CPM and we propose a PAM decomposition characterized by the presence of a single main pulse and by uncorrelated pseudo-symbols for a half integer modulation index value for this ternary CPM. We show that shaped offset quadrature phase shift keying belongs to this CPM family and we provide a new reduced complexity trellis detector capable of reaching identical performance as the one introduced by Perrins as well as new linear detectors.