[Rallen89]

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.

>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

[tivert]

> 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.

> 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.