Some optical components have polarization dependent loss (PDL), which degrades the performance of optical measurement systems. Various PDL suppression methods have been proposd, most of them have rather complicated structures. In this paper we propose a new simple method for PDL suppression, in which a single birefringent element is concatenated to a PDL device with their birefringent axes offset by π/4. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experiments, that is, polarization dependent loss variation amplitude V of a device relative to its average loss is reduced from 90% to 2% by using a 2 m long PANDA fiber for an LED light source whose central wavelength λ0 and spectral width Δλ are 847 nm and 55 nm, respectively. Furthermore, for an SLD light source with λ0=1539 nm and Δλ=71 nm, V as much as 80% is reduced to 2% by using the same PANDA fiber.

A technique for reducing fiber four-wave mixing (FWM) in multichannel transmissions is proposed. Birefringent elements are inserted on the way of transmission lines. Due to the effect of birefringent elements on the polarization states, the effective crosstalk due to FWM is expected to be 3/16 of that in the worst case in conventional systems.