Pretty much - call that antenna gain, it's much cheaper to put bigger and better hardware on the ground. Recall though that the signal still goes through a TDRSS satellite, which also has a bigger dish.

unrelated to the ISS but might be interesting to some people http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

The fact that we can talk to something 15 billion km away is mind-blowing.

It makes light (at 1 billion km per hour) seem slow.

More mindblowing? I, Joe Sixpack, can see the current Deep Space Network status overview (your URL) from my bedroom whilst in my underwear. Science!