After discussing with Koji, I decided to try and align the input beam polarization at the PSL fiber coupler to one of the special axes of the PM fiber. The motivation is to try and narrow down the source of the large RF beatnote amplitude drift I noticed and reported last night.

The setup for doing so is shown in Attachment #1 - essentially, I setup one of the newly purchased couplers in a mount, set up a PBS, and placed two photodiodes at the S and P ports of the PBS. The idea is to rotate the input coupler in its mount, thereby maximizing the PER (monitored on two Thorlabs PDA520s - I didn't check the gain balance of them). 

I spent ~30mins doing some preliminary trials just now, and, I was able to achieve a PER of ~1/20. But I think much better numbers were reported in this SURF project (although I'm not entirely sure I understand that measurement). I will spend a little more time tweaking the alignment. The procedure is tricky as at some point, simply rotating the mount reduces the mode-matching efficiency into the fiber so much that it is not possible to get a meaningful PER measurement from the photodiodes. I'm adjouring for now, more to follow...