(Henry Spencer) wrote in message ...
In article ,
Benign Vanilla wrote:
Even the biggest dish antennas are nearing the limits of picking up
Voyager's weak and distant signal...

I wonder why we would not launch some intermediate satellites to act as
repeaters. Seems they could be light, fast and cheap and extend the life of
these other missions.
What are the complexities?

Mostly, that the idea doesn't work very well. The problem is that a relay
satellite halfway to (say) Voyager 1 will be hearing a signal only four
times as strong as what Earth is hearing... and the antennas and receivers
on Earth are much more than four times as good as the ones on a cheap,
lightweight relay satellite.

At what point would it be worth it to add a long leg to the net of
earth-based dishes by placing a dish at, say, a Lagrangre point?

I don't think this would pay much in terms of making the effective
antenna any larger than building another eb dish, and synchronizing
things would probably be a bit fussy.

My take is that the advantage would be that this antenna would be
available for long stretches because diurnal pointing issues wouldn't
be involved. There would be occultations occuring slightly later or
slightly before the eb antennas experience them.

In fact, this sort of application would probably only happen if there
was another reason to populate that position and the dish could be
piggybacked on that for relatively low cost.

/dps