Why voyager uses VLF? Any scientific reason?

[davenn]

Pretty much all of the space probes over the last at least 20 years or so use the 8 - 9 GHz freq range


There's a lot of us amateur radio operators and a few non hams are in the amateur DSN ... Deep Space Network
and are regularly receiving telemetry from the myriad of NASA and other probes that are spread out over the solar system

We even have a Yahoo Group dedicated to talking about experiments, equip use and upgrades, signals received etc

Dave

 

[Dean Huster]

Many of the ground-exploring space probes use a base station and sends out a robot probe to do the actual work. The transmitter on the base is permanantly aligned to Earth using UHF or microwave frequencies for comm and the robotic probe has a different radio link to the base and may use VLF for it's ground-hugging properties, since it may be well out of sight of the base. Since VHF and up is considered line-of-sight, it would never work in this application. Consider that all the inner planets (until you hit the "gas planets" are smaller than Earth so the radio horizon is a lot closer.

 

[dr pepper]

I talk to a freind on a boat on 26 mhz, his mooring is in a deep cut, there is land above all around him but I still get a good signal with only a few watts either end, so I have to agree lower freqs travel along the ground better, I spose ground wave would be the term.