I'm not sure that the more interesting bit is the voyager->earth part. Keep in mind that there are inefficiencies in simply transmitting with more power. The m

I'm not sure that the more interesting bit is the voyager->earth part. Keep in mind that there are inefficiencies in simply transmitting with more power. The more you amplify, the more noise you introduce. No matter what you do, you can never improve the size and hardware that you're transmitting to. I don't work much with RF, but, with optical transmissions, the major innovations I've seen are from better receivers that are better able to separate signal from noise at lower power levels. On the earth side of things, we can use massive dishes connected to modern hardware that have very advanced signal processing capabilities. Ultimately, Voyager is 1960s-era hardware with very very very minimal ability to change the software in any way. If they wanted to (and had the funding to) build a dish on earth that was 10x larger to receive the signals from Voyager with hugely advanced signal processing, that's a totally doable thing. On the other hand, there is virtually nothing you can do to make voyager hear better. Ultimately, its a lot easier to amplify something faint than it is to shout louder.