Amazing, 46 years and still ticking. You know that was Made in America. Try that with your Made in Mexico or China appliance.
Amen.
We are to believe that we are still communicating with something 12 billion miles away...? At the speed of light that is 20+ hours. We are to believe that the spacecraft is so perfectly aligned as to send and receive signals 12 billion miles away...?
Alignment can be extremely coarse for xmit from Voyagers. RF dissipates following inverse square law, same as light, into a very broad cone. All you need here is large antennas and good amps. The signal to the spacecraft is trickier but follows the same principle. Low data rates on the right frequencies work wonders.
It's not pin-point; even a narrow beam transmission would cover a massive area at that distance so they just need to be fairly close. For example, a laser pointer directed at the moon would cover at least a third of its surface.
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