How To Contact The Voyager 2 Probe (PART 1)

There are high gain antennas on both ends, and use of error correcting codes, as well as extremely high grade low noise amplifiers on the Earth side. The Voyagers have a 3.7m diameter parabolic radio dish, larger than the Hubble space telescope's mirror even. That alone provides a huge amount of gain on communications. Additionally, the spacecraft have 10s of watts of power available for transmitting signals, which is a fair bit considering (while on the other end the ground stations have up to hundreds of thousands of watts to transmit). The ground-stations in the deep space network (DSN) are tens of meters across, a small antenna is 34m, the biggest ones are 70m across. That also provides a huge amount of gain alone. It means that there is more area to collect signals from the spacecraft and it means that the beam from the ground station to the spacecraft is much tighter, concentrating the total transmission power into a smaller cross-sectional area at the distance of the spacecraft. The spacecraft also uses error correcting codes, which involve transmitting many more bits than the underlying data, but in such a way that errors due to noise are not only detectable but correctable. On top of all of that you have the state of the art low noise amplifiers in the DSN antennae. A typical low noise amplifier is a carefully built electronics assembly made by experts. The DSN amplifiers? They use 99.95% purity ruby rods chilled to 4 degrees above absolute zero to form microwave MAS

Well, we need much more on our end than the power of a cellular signal- For instance, one of the support antenna dishes of the Deep Space Network is DSS-42 in Canberra... which is a 70 meter diameter parabolic dish. And the transmit power on our side is in the tens of kilowatts. Literally tens of thousands of times more power needed than a cell phone and directed by a 70 meter dish.... We need that because the dish on the Voyager probes is 'only' 3.7 meters. Still... not a cell phone antenna. That said, the transmit power of the Voyagers is tiny in comparison to ours and it is closer to that of the cell phone analogy- still more, however, at about 23 watts [1]. So, our end task of receiving that, by the time it gets to us, is damn impressive indeed I think. [0] [this video] [1] [link]