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Comment by ragebol | Hacker News Reader

I think the obscurity is more due to the fact that reaching it with sufficient signal strength requires a big, big dish with a big, big amplifier.

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Also, the exact uplink and downlink frequencies are not published.

https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/DeepCommo_Chapter3--14... seems to include pretty specific up/down carrier frequencies and channels used.

I wonder why the frequency was redacted in this tweet.

https://x.com/nascom1/status/1851789221885022416

Maybe they're hiding the current Doppler shift? Or just trying to prevent noise from randos experimenting in that range?

They removed the frequencies from some of the more popular sites. That started during early stages of the Ukraine invasion.

But it's still super easy to find them.

Usually it takes a few hours until the sat ham guys find them and post spectrums.

The frequencies of most research satellites are all well known. But it takes more than 30 seconds of Googling.

I'm more surprised that Russia or China haven't attempted to communicate with things like Voyager. Not necessarily to sabotage, but to find out as much as they can about it by interacting with it.

At the time? Perhaps, I don't know when the design documents* became public.

But today, Voyager 1 is a 50 year old curiosity, still of interest to cosmologists of course, but governments will be less interested in it than archeologists.

* e.g. https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/VOY_library.html and https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19660011758/downloads/19...

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