I suspect they can’t. It is quite possible security was not on anyone’s mind back then and the last thing they want are rouge signals from some amateur fucking up generations worth of work.
>Because of their distances, the Voyagers can only communicate through the largest 230-foot (70-meter) dish antennas in NASA's Deep Space Network, or by arraying multiple smaller antennas together to detect the faint signals coming from the spacecraft
> Sure if u have a 70 meter dish laying around and this is near peak cold War tensions so I'd say security was on people's minds then.
Don't just think it's amateurs, nation states aren't above mischief either. If Russia has one of those laying around, there's a reasonably high chance they'd use it to send a big "fuck you" to America in today's geopolitical climate (e.g. command each Voyager to burn all its remaining fuel to spin on an axis perpendicular to Earth.
Edit: and it looks like Russia does have a dish like that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevpatoria_RT-70_radio_telesco...:
> The Yevpatoria RT-70 radio telescope (P-2500, RT-70) is an RT-70 radio telescope and planetary radar at the Center for Deep Space Communications, Yevpatoria, Crimea. ... It has an advantage in comparison with other large radio telescopes in the fact that the complex includes powerful transmitters that allow active space experiments.
I'm not a RF engineer, but it's a fair guess that synthesizing the signal isn't going to be the problem, having the probes receiving it is another story.
And it should beg the question: why do you think DirecTV managed to use the smaller antennas ;)
Aha! Now you'll have to wait another 40 years to collect information from deep space! Take THAT, Americans!
It's called the Space Race for a reason.
Deep space is quite literally as far away from that as it gets. There's no realistic mission that far out in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our great grand children that will have any realistic return for a nation beyond pure exploratory interest.
If Russia or China are really interested in objects far outside our solar system, they're probably better off sitting back and letting NASA do it, given that they don't have to wait decades to do so. Something tells me that neither of them actually cares, though.