All phones are satellite phones, already.

[Gman]

Receiving a GPS signal from a satellite is much easier than sending a signal to a satellite.

Bingo.

GPS sats are in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), 12,250 miles up and they go around the earth twice a day. I see the reference to DirecTV, which is in geosynchronous orbit (GSO) in the Clarke Belt, and it is over 22,200 miles away. Sending signals to those satellites requires a directional dish and you have to remember that you're hitting a target about the size of a car.

A constellation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) communications satellites for global Internet access has been theorized and is in some limited testing.

One problem with using satellite for Internet is latency and the need to use ground stations to reach terrestrial connected infrastructure. Another issue is that the satellites themselves have limited bandwidth and the more users that are connected to them, the worse the user experience. At least Ubiquiti is focused on low bandwidth communications such as text.

If you have a bunch of these LEO satellites about 310 miles out continually travelling around the planet, imagine the increased challenges of launching something in a deeper orbit and avoiding collisions. The International Space Station is also in LEO at 254 miles out. If a satellite has station-keeping issues and the orbit degrades, things get really interesting.

[MrPrena]

Slightly off topic.
(NOTE: I am not bashing, but ranting. it was about 15-20 years ago (98-04'ish). Ive seen their recent course work, and looks like CU hasn't changed a thing to TLEN.)

This thread reminds me of TLEN at U of CO at Boulder. The bigger joker grad degree you can get.
https://catalog.colorado.edu/courses-a-z/tlen/

I have 15 friends who did TLEN. HOwever, the CU Telecommunication has been blackballed by Samsung, LG, Apple, Cisco, VZ, ATT, S, and QCOM + other top global 100.
why? it is fake engineering degree.

[asmo]

Uhh.. i=1/d?

[Holger Danske]

Ham radio operators can do this today using a handheld transceiver and a directional antenna. What impresses me is the guys that bounce their signal off of the moon. This is a technique called Earth Moon Earth bounce.

[OtterbatHellcat]

That shit gives me a boner. Just sayin'.

[Irving]

Is that kind of like when roofers bounce the sound of their pneumatic nail guns off of all the other houses in the neighborhood?

[Holger Danske]

I suppose so. The ham guys just have cooler equipment.

[FoxtArt]

It may be possible for a few cell phones, but satellites do not have the data capacity to handle even 0.01% of them. That's why Iridium calls are so expensive, and why satellite internet is always capped on low bandwidth.

PS: Satellites do not actually send GPS coordinates to your phone. They basically just scream EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE and your phone, like listening to a passing train, uses the Doppler shift effect to figure out the location of the satellites, then triangulating between multiple screaming satellites without any real data transfer, and figuring out it's own location by figuring out the location of the satellites in reference to itself.