The PMC reflection made it seem that the beam going into it was misaligned. I went to the table and aligned the input beam to maximize the PMC transmission. I got ~10% improvement.
Just to check if something was loose, I started tapping things upstream of the Faraday. When I tapped the actual PMC body it seemed to get unseated and the reflected (unlocked) power jumped up by more than a factor of two.
I don't understand how this could be. The attached trend of the PMC channels shows that ever since the PSL upgrade, the PMC refl has been at the low level of ~0.3 V, except for a brief phase soon after the upgrade late in 2010 and then also for a few hours early in May of 2012.
If the PMC body actually moved, it seems that the pointing into the MC would also change and I don't see that. So what else can it be? Is there some clipping or dust or a burn spot on the PMC REFL path?
The PMC refl image was lost after the body re-settled itself. Jenne and I re-aligned it and added a 0.5 ND filter to the existing ND in order to account for the higher power. We should hide all of the reflective ND filters and just use absorbtive ND for the cameras to prevent reflections.

This image of the past hour shows the event at just before midnight (0650 UTC) where the PMC reflection goes up from 0.28 to 0.85. |