I highly doubt an amateur has the means to contact the probes. Heck, I'm not even sure any organization besides NASA has antennas big enough for the job.

You don't think a modified DirecTV antenna will do it?

Over 20 billions of kilometers away?

I'm not a RF engineer, but it's a fair guess that synthesizing the signal isn't going to be the problem, having the probes receiving it is another story.

If it's sarcasm I'm failing to detect with my l/4 antenna but no

And it should beg the question: why do you think DirecTV managed to use the smaller antennas ;)

The Russians, or the Chinese.

Maybe, but what would they gain by this exactly?

Aha! Now you'll have to wait another 40 years to collect information from deep space! Take THAT, Americans!

> Maybe, but what would they gain by this exactly?

It's called the Space Race for a reason.

It'd be one thing if those probes remained in near-space. There are of course advantages to a country having its own exclusive information strategically and possibly for future space-mining.

Deep space is quite literally as far away from that as it gets. There's no realistic mission that far out in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our great grand children that will have any realistic return for a nation beyond pure exploratory interest.

If Russia or China are really interested in objects far outside our solar system, they're probably better off sitting back and letting NASA do it, given that they don't have to wait decades to do so. Something tells me that neither of them actually cares, though.

That is true now, but maybe once the probes go completely dead with no chance of revival and there is no risk of tampering?

NASA have a history of reusing bits and pieces when they develop new vehicles and systems. If someone learns how to control Voyager there may not be much left to figure out if they want to control New Horizons etc.

That is a fair call. If that is the case, robably best to just leave it.

Sure if u have a 70 meter dish laying around and this is near peak cold War tensions so I'd say security was on people's minds then.

>Because of their distances, the Voyagers can only communicate through the largest 230-foot (70-meter) dish antennas in NASA's Deep Space Network, or by arraying multiple smaller antennas together to detect the faint signals coming from the spacecraft

> I suspect they can’t. It is quite possible security was not on anyone’s mind back then and the last thing they want are rouge signals from some amateur fucking up generations worth of work.

> Sure if u have a 70 meter dish laying around and this is near peak cold War tensions so I'd say security was on people's minds then.

Don't just think it's amateurs, nation states aren't above mischief either. If Russia has one of those laying around, there's a reasonably high chance they'd use it to send a big "fuck you" to America in today's geopolitical climate (e.g. command each Voyager to burn all its remaining fuel to spin on an axis perpendicular to Earth.

Edit: and it looks like Russia does have a dish like that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevpatoria_RT-70_radio_telesco...:

> The Yevpatoria RT-70 radio telescope (P-2500, RT-70) is an RT-70 radio telescope and planetary radar at the Center for Deep Space Communications, Yevpatoria, Crimea. ... It has an advantage in comparison with other large radio telescopes in the fact that the complex includes powerful transmitters that allow active space experiments.