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by tibbon 5349 days ago
Went higher than the GPS satellites could see?
4 comments

No, but there are limits on how high commercial GPS receivers will work to prevent them from being used to guide ballistic missiles.
But the rules is that the gps devices needs to record a measurement greater than 100k feet. If that's higher than what GPS satellites can see then no one can win.
Two things:

First, GPS satellites are in orbit ~20,000 km altitude, so this rocket is nowhere near too high. The beamwidth is pretty wide (it covers the entire half of the Earth, after all). Some quick research shows that below 3–4000km, there isn't much difference. http://emergentspace.com/gps_pubs/SSVP-v1.07-2column.pdf.

You should be able to get exact orbits (to the centimeter!) from the NGS (http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/orbits/), if you're interested.

Second, its the receiver that sees the GPS satellites, not the other way around. The satellites transmit, the receiver does not.

GPS satellites are much higher than that.