The smallest dish used to recieve the signals from the rovers here on earth is 35m, and the hardware beneath them uses enormous ammounts of power to amplify and decode the signal. Several orders of magnitude more than any spacecraft has had to hand. And you would need the same caperbility as the 35m dishes on earth because most of the time the mars-dish distance would have to be on the order of 1AU or more.

Remember - the rovers were never meant to last this long - technically the meat of their missions finished about 140 days ago It's only 12 days of downtime (not 'weeks') - and as far as i'm concerned, for the planning teams is well earned down time.

Solar conjunction has been an issue with interplanetary probes since the beginning - Cassini went thru one not long after SOI for instance.

Doug