1 trillionth of a watt

[eorange]

There is an excellent show on PBS about the design and construction of Voyager. The power of the signal from Voyager is less than 1 trillionth of a watt by the time it reaches the NASA receiving station.

See this:

Voyager's Scientific Toolkit | The Science | Farthest

 

[db_gain]

It's all due to Golay encoding of the signal that a trillionth of a watt results in any data collection, a very effective encoding method, also used on HF in the now little used GTOR fsk mode.

 

[k7ng]

And a 70-m (230-ft) antenna...