[jandrese]

200dB is the one way freespace path loss to Geo orbit.

Back when I learned this I was shocked that satellite communications work at all.

I can only imagine how much loss you have trying to hear communications from the Voyager probes now.

[drmpeg]

318 dB for Voyager 1 at X-band.

[boredgamer2]

> Back when I learned this I was shocked

Care to explain? I'm not following..

[jandrese]

Every 3dB is roughly a halving of the power level. It's hard to wrap a human brain around the orders of magnitude difference, the numbers are so far outside of anything we can encounter in the human scale.

Still, I will try to make an analogy. Start with the smallest transistor we make today, (7nm) and scale it up by the equivalent of 200dB and it would be 258 million km across, or about the same as the diameter of the Earth's orbit around the sun.