Provided is an optical apparatus and method wherein power transfer coefficients arising from SRS are measured at a designated co-location point and the power of dithers, which are impressed on the channels of a multiplexed optical signal propagating through the optical apparatus, is measured at each co-location point. The respective plugs can be pushed out of a body of the adapter via a rotary pillar. Current microarray methods are overly sensitive to the detection of a visible distinction between pixels associated with probes and pixels associated with background. The packet to be mirrored is encrypted.