system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does NASA still have signal with Voyager 1 and Voyager 2?

This thing (Voyager 1) was launched in 1977. Seems like a pretty dark time for that kind of signal-reaching technology, but it's STILL surviving. When will we lose signal with it? I'm just so fascinated by the fact that this thing is so old but still seems futuristic, to this day, in my opinion. The fact that they built this thing and it's so far away at such an incredible speed.
gpt
It doesn't take futuristic technology to have such long-range communication. Voyagers were designed from the start to have enough radio power to communicate from interplanetary space, and their RTG will last for maybe another decade. On the receiving end, we're using gigantic radiotelescopes of the Deep Space Network. We have been able to continuously upgrade *those*, especially during the *Galileo* fiasco when a very fancy Jupiter mission failed to deploy its high-gain antenna dish, so to salvage the mission the groundside systems were dramatically overhauled.

That's ultimately the trick. We can use better and bigger groundside arrays - Russia has an old 600 m dish, for example, and that's before we start with synthetic apertures that allow you to combine dishes on different sides of the planet - to both receive the weakening signal, and to send signals of sufficient strength to be received.