  A chain of atom-microcavity systems coupled by a common fiber is considered.
We analyze the formation of supermodes and focus on the dependence of this
effect on the chain geometry and the number of atom-cavity subsystems. We show
that the significance of supermodes to the transmission increases with the
number of atom-cavity subsystems. We identify spectral ranges in which the
chain geometry decides whether supermodes are formed, and ranges which are
insensitive to the geometry. Furthermore, we show that the reflection signal
allows to identify which cavities couple to atoms, which is a crucial
information in experimental realizations of longer atom-cavity chain systems.
