Does the ELT of an aircraft when activated communicate with the satellite?
I’ll give you what I know about the ELT the USAF uses. Ours transmits on 141.5MHz. It transmits less than 100mW, which really isn’t much. It would be a long shot for a satellite to pick our ELT up on a good day. Then take into account if the airplane crashes, there is a good chance that the ELT antenna will be broken off. Now you have less power output. So, to sum it up, our crash sites will pretty much get found by the smoke, not by an ELT, unless the rescue party receiving the signal is pretty much right on top of it. The new system with the 406MHz freq should work much better, but we aren’t upgrading any time soon.