Have a look at Daniel Estevez blog. He's a regular user of bigger telescopes (like ATA) and managed to receive and decode Voyager 1. He wrote a GNURadio decoder for it.

https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/

A photo of the dish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwingeloo_Radio_Observatory#/m...

I got to visit the telescope earlier this year, its pretty cool. In a forest outside some small towns. For how well connected the Netherlands is, its pretty hard to reach.

We looked at the sun and some planets in radio frequencies (its all radio astronomy with LOFAR nearby).

That they can listen to Voyager with such an old instrument is incredible. It must help that the satellite is aimed at us.

> NASA uses dishes in the Deep-Space Network (DSN) to communicate with Voyager 1. These dishes, located around the globe in Goldstone, Canberra and Madrid, are optimized for these higher frequencies

Madrid Longitude: 4.3° W

Goldstone Longitude: 116.9­° W

Canberra Longitude: 149.0° E

153.3° from Madrid to Canberra and only 94.1° from Canberra to Goldstone. Bit of a slight to Western Australia to skip over the ~120° option and put the third dish in Canberra.

If I'm understanding this right, they were able to receive the carrier, but didn't demodulate any signal or decode any data?

> Since the Dwingeloo telescope was designed for observing at lower frequencies than the 8.4GHz telemetry transmitted by Voyager 1, a new antenna had to be mounted.

Is there any info on this new antenna?

Rad. I was pretty stoked when I received signals from Australia and New Zealand ~12000km away, and later from the International Space Station (actually technically much closer lol). I can't imagine how damn cool it would be to pick up anything at all from a freakin' deep space probe some 25billion km away!!

I'm surprised they can still get a positive SNR at those distances. Incredible

The fact that Voyager is far enough for light to take a day to reach us is mind blowing to me.

And that our solar system is more than a light day in diameter is also mind blowing.

Incredible achievement but would really appreciate if they laid out the details.

> almost 25 billion kilometers

Had to reread that a few times to make sure

It would be nice if some HAM operators or other citizen scientists could provide some evidence about the US moon landing that can be verified independently. One friend won't shut up about it and it grows tiresome.

I know this is super nitpicky but Ham isn't an acronym. It's ham as in ham-fisted -- amateur radio.

> While we have shown that we can use the Dwingeloo telescope to receive the carrier signal from Voyager-1, we cannot use the telescope to communicate with it. NASA uses dishes in the Deep-Space Network (DSN) to communicate with Voyager 1. These dishes, located around the globe in Goldstone, Canberra and Madrid, are optimized for these higher frequencies and have a diameter of 70m, much larger than the 25m Dwingeloo Telescope.

I wonder if this was included as a "please don't ask us if we're capable of hacking it, we are not" CYA.

"HAM" of course stands for "HAM - Acronym? Maybe!"