The White Mountain Polarimeter (WMPol) is a dedicated ground-based microwave telescope and receiver system for observing polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background. WMPol is located at an altitude of 3880 meters on a plateau in the White Mountai
ns of Eastern California, USA, at the Barcroft Facility of the University of California White Mountain Research Station. Presented here is a description of the instrument and the data collected during April through October 2004. We set an upper limit on $E$-mode polarization of 14 $mumathrm{K}$ (95% confidence limit) in the multipole range $170<ell<240$. This result was obtained with 422 hours of observations of a 3 $mathrm{deg}^2$ sky area about the North Celestial Pole, using a 42 GHz polarimeter. This upper limit is consistent with $EE$ polarization predicted from a standard $Lambda$-CDM concordance model.
The COsmic Foreground Explorer (COFE) is a balloon-borne microwave polarime- ter designed to measure the low-frequency and low-l characteristics of dominant diffuse polarized foregrounds. Short duration balloon flights from the Northern and Southern
Hemispheres will allow the telescope to cover up to 80% of the sky with an expected sensitivity per pixel better than 100 $mu K / deg^2$ from 10 GHz to 20 GHz. This is an important effort toward characterizing the polarized foregrounds for future CMB experiments, in particular the ones that aim to detect primordial gravity wave signatures in the CMB polarization angular power spectrum.
