I have attended the 100 year SSS the past two days. The real eye opener was a presentation by Claudio Maccone about using the Sun's gravitational field as a lens for optical and RF path enhancement. The effect works with any orbital mass (moon perhaps?), but the proposal was to establish fixed interstellar comm links with little path loss.
I present this here because it might be food for discussion about placement of relay satellites in orbits around masses other than Earth, may have an apparent and usable gain.
There are a bunch of links, you can start here. Perhaps some might want to take the math and work out how we could use our sun or moon for a gain lens for the next OSCAR, and perhaps with a wideband RX experiment.
Secondly, I think SETI can benefit! The topic of "ET" knowing this trick was suggested.
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=785