The team, tiny as it is, made the trek out to the beautiful, scenic, and altogether inspiring Calern site of the Observatoire to participate in a frequency comparison campaign with Refimeve in mid-January.
We arrived at the building Métrologie Optimus (MéO), where the local Refimeve downlink is available from a Exail / iXblue / MuQuans repeating station. We compared this signal to the local passive and active masers (T4 Science) via an optical frequency comb, a Rubicomb by Vescent, brought for demonstration by Baptiste Callendret of Opton Laser. It came out the box, onto the table, and we were in operation within ten minutes or so...
Eleonora Polini and I were joined by colleagues stationed at Calern, Duy-Ha Phung and Clément Courde, as well as Olivier Alibart and Nicolas Forget of INPHYNI - we can not claim we were lacking in local expertise! Plenty of data was taken, which is the furthest station in l'hexagone from the source at the Observatoire de Paris - analyse en cours! Stay tuned!
