[X] My Assistant

[pjm]

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

[edstrick]

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 Messenger]

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.