But how are they going to pick up the transmission from a phone, which is incredibly low power and designed to be picked up from a maximum range of 70km.
The Wikipedia article also says that timing considerations give a maximum range of 35km. Which is a lot lower than the 2,000km of Low Earth Orbit.
Yes, wouldn’t this just be like GPS?
I’m also not convinced the phone->satellite is practical/feasible.
Still leaves them with the interesting problem of the satellite necessarily seeing a lot of handsets at the same time; methinks even if all other engineering issues were magically resolved, they'd run out of bandwidth real fast. (Not to mention the regulatory hurdles.)
If they placed their sat at 100 km (right at the limits of "space") maybe it would be possible to be in range of a cell phone.
Even ISS at 300-400 km orbit has to be regularly reboosted because it's continuously losing altitude.