Hi folks,

Luis CT1DMK who is a fellow amateur-DSN station has sucessfully detected a carrier from Voyager-1 which is a long way from earth, about 14698000000Km. He's made a nice write up on his site at http://w3ref.cfn.ist.utl.pt/cupido/dsn.html which apart from Voyager has info on other DSN space-craft received.

Regards

Paul
www.uhf-satcom.com

With a 5.6m dish! Wow!

Greets to Portugal.

Already a thread on the subject:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...indpost&p=48809

Hi, yeah that thread is on the rx effort by the Bochum guys on the 1st April using their 20m dish which has a lot more gain thank the 'smaller' 5.6m dish of Luis CT1DMK.

regards,

Paul.

I vote that we turn this dude loose on a VLA and see what he can stir up from the Pioneer probes!

The pioneer probes aren't talking, that's the problem. From what I gather, the power supply voltage got so low on Pioneer 10 that it needed an uplink signal to "excite" the frequency linked transmitter in some way to "arouse" it enough to trigger transmission the last time<s?> they contacted it, and the voltage is so low now that's not enough, or something else has failed or won't respond due to low voltage.

The Pioneer craft use a phase-locked loop for Doppler signal responding: This is the lowest power communication mode, and you are correct, it is the only one that could possibly work. The PLL design allowed the use of Earth-based clocks to clock the signal generated by the craft, which could not have been outfitted with a clock accurate enough to detect the anomally.