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Not really. The phone only appears "off" but is in-fact in a low power mode providing beacons. It won't work if the battery were removed.

Also, modern iPhones use tower-assisted GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS, BeiDou, and NavIC) so the satellite isn't necessarily Navistar. With fewer or no towers, and positioned in an odd orientation on the ground, a good fix becomes much less likely, and the range can increase from <1m to 10's-100's of m.



> Not really. The phone only appears "off" but is in-fact in a low power mode providing beacons. It won't work if the battery were removed.

Sure, how else would it work? But people usually don’t disassemble their phone before losing it on a train/in a taxi etc.

> modern iPhones use tower-assisted GNSS

Yes, but GP says they didn’t have cell coverage where they lost it, so that wouldn’t help.




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