Lynk sends the first text message from space directly to a normal cell phone

Last year Lynk — then called Ubiquitilink — showed that, from now on, every phone can be a satellite phone. But they’ve spent the last year honing the product and have just demonstrated the real thing: Sending a plain old text message from a “cell tower in space” to a normal phone on the surface.

Of course there are “real” satellite phones, but these expensive, complex devices establish a dedicated link using frequencies not used by normal mobiles — and of course, they’re quite expensive and bulky. The whole idea of Lynk is to provide similarly globe-spanning connectivity without anyone having to buy a dish, an accessory, or even a new phone.

Ubiquitilink advance means every phone is now a satellite phone

It works, as founder and CEO Charles Miller explained to me last year, very much the way normal cell signals work. It turns out that when your radio beam goes straight up instead of passing through buildings and the landscape, it can easily reach low Earth orbit. The problem comes with the physics involved in synchronizing the signals — doppler shift and other factors.

That’s the problem Lynk set out to solve, and has lofted three satellites to test. A fourth is on the way, but the third was perfectly capable of their first public demonstration of what could eventually be a universally accessible data service.

“This is the first time we actually sent a message from space to a standard, unmodified phone,” Miller said. “We did it in the most visible way that people can understand, an emergency alert.”

You can watch the video of the text being received below. Bear in mind these guys are sitting out in the Falklands, a location where cell coverage is essentially nil but which happens to be an ideal location for receiving a satellite signal. They get pretty excited.