I know. I’m 34, and I barely function or communicate useful data at all.
And from the bottom of the Marianas Trench, at that! 
According to the wikipedia entry, the magnitude of the pioneer effect is roughly equal the speed of light times Hubble’s Constant:dubious:…though also states that galactically bound objects are not subject to expansion of the universe, either theoretically or measured.
Yeah, possible deviations from Newton’s law of gravity do tend to bring out woo-wooery, but the unexplained slowdown itself still appears real.
You’re right. I was imagining current star trackers which have hundreds of stars in their catalogs and can operate while spinning. (E.g., here – warning: some jargon ahead), but we need to have some well-situated nearby stars to give us any sort of accuracy. (And I’m really not too familiar with my nearest neighbors, being a typical LA resident).
IAC, around page 46 of this PDF (warning - 13 MB), they describe how the Voyagers’ star trackers are used, and the method requires that they take two different observations of the same star and measuring the angle the sun moves around boresight, which is always pointed at the Earth. They claimed an overall 0.1 degree error in all three axes, but the method uses up precious propellant, and who cares, since it’s not Voyager’s orientation that’s important – it also needs to see a measurable change in location of some of the stars it’s looking at. (To be fair, what I was imagining is basically the method we assumed the ETs would use to find us, given that that’s part of the location information we included on the gold records; the info just isn’t useful for the much smaller distances we’re trying to navigate as we look for one of the satellites.)
In this link,, they made note of a group using very long baseline interferometry to determine the Voyagers’ positions within one kilometer; they’re probably your best pre-packaged solution.
However, if you can’t get info from those guys (because they need to use several of the largest radio telescopes around the globe to collect data simultaneously), and Elendil’s Heir’s friend can’t get to it, I’d say, shoot yourself out there radially in the general direction of either of the satellites, say, 90% of the way there, and track their X-band transmissions towards Earth. Since they send data so seldom, you have to travel slower than faster-than-light so you don’t stray outside the beam from the satellite to Earth. You’d use interferometry with this method as well; all you’re doing is estimating an angle off your antenna’s boresight by noting the difference in phase of whatever you’ve received as it hits different parts of your antenna (or different antennas). This doesn’t give you anything like the data quality from long baseline interferometry; it just helps you adjust your own trajectory as you close in on it. I’d say it’s worth a shot.
They’re not satellites.
The thing with the Pioneer anomaly is that it’s definitely real, but it’s small enough that there are a number of perfectly boring phenomenon that might explain it, and it’s very hard to rule out all of them. I wouldn’t mind seeing a probe designed explicitly to control for all of those effects to get better measurements, though, just in case the explanation really is a hitherto-unsuspected physical phenomenon.
Warm up? If her name is Andromeda, I have a several suggestions. 
Sorry, just couldn’t … resist.
I am confused do not transmissions fly in a straight line? Can’t we tell exactly where they are just by the info they send back?
These are radio waves, not laser beams. They spread out a lot. You can get an accurate distance, but only an approximate direction.
Radio direction finders