Travelling modes of single-photon-added coherent states (SPACS) are characterized via optical homodyne tomography. Given a set of experimentally measured quadrature distributions, we estimate parameters of the state and also extract information about the detector efficiency. The method used is a minimal distance estimation between theoretical and experimental quantities, which additionally allows to evaluate the precision of estimated parameters. Given experimental data, we also estimate the lower and upper bounds on fidelity. The results are believed to encourage preciser engineering and detection of SPACS.