Yes, what is really needed is a way to baseband a good swath of spectrum, e.g. in the neighborhood of 100MHz to 10GHz, so that conventional electronics can be used to study something more than simple low rate there/not-there activity. And conversely a way to modulate similar bandwidth onto arbitrary frequencies up in the THz region.
What's an antenna if not something that can receive radio signals?
The same way an LED is not a solar panel. It will give you some voltage, but basically a rounding error above zero.
Antenna are about capturing energy over macro scale areas. This atom is measuring electromagnetic oscillation at a particular point in space. Technically you can recover a signal, but only a rounding error above the noise floor. It doesn't capture energy.
These are physics tools for specific things, not general radio receivers for transmitted information.