NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re:NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2 by bell-cot on Monday July 31, 2023 @09:29AM (#36942183)

Untrue, strictly speaking. So long as the combination of your transmitter's power and your antenna's directionality (aka 'gain') provide enough extra dB's of signal strength (to compensate for the dB's "lost" on Voyager's end, due to the off-axis antenna) it'll work fine.

OTOH, dB's are effectively a log scale, and NASA's "not good enough now" transmitter & antenna cost quite a few $million. What's your budget?

(Yeah - if the Arecibo radio telescope was still on operation, it might well have been capable of doing this.)

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Re:NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2 by guraf on Monday July 31, 2023 @01:39PM (#36946132)

I suspect it is true, strictly speaking.

In optimal orientation, Voyager's signal peaks at -160dBm when received on the 70m dishes. Now it's shooting 2 degrees off which means the signal misses earth by hundreds of millions of kilometres. What kind of magical high gain antenna do you envision that could still receive it, assuming money isn't a problem?

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Re:NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2 by bell-cot on Monday July 31, 2023 @02:08PM (#36946529)

Voyager 2 has a direction radio antenna, not a laser producing a sharp-edged beam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Communications

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_antenna#Beamwidth

How about this antenna? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array

Or this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...

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