snipped for  brevity ( ha )  .........

protected by cammo dudes , same as it ever was.  dunno if the foot
print would spill over outside  the buffer zone or not .  worth
thinking about . 

no , thats an old misnomer  that seems to go on and on ......... 

I'm not saying there aren't  plenty of  surveillance sats that are
driven to locations and parked to do their job ( why do you think
Atlantis has to go up and refuel those turkeys  all the time ? )
.......

but the nature of  SARSats would make them  a 
much different animal.  hypothetically speaking , of course ........

sarsat  units  need to be in motion to get their best image.  by
moving  they illuminate all those shadow areas and get multiple vector
bounces off  the  targets ( T-gnd , T-T etc )  , all this giving them
more  3-d  information and eliminating  " black "  ( dead ) areas
and adding to 3-d resolution ( masking effect ) .  think of it like
this as a simplified explanation .....   think of the  GPS satellite
system and how those few birds are able to cover the  entire planet ,
all the time , and keep at least 3 birds in view at all times.  

now think of a similar network of sarsat birds but 3X ( maybe 10X+ )
more dense in birds , all tightly networked together and all under
control of  multiple world wide ground stations  ( if need be ) .
it would easily be possible to assign  large amounts of ground
surveillance target sites  to the network birds  ( probably only
limited by bandwidth and available computer resources  and these would
be state of the art huge )   there might be as many as ( say )  9 or
maybe even  30 birds able to " see " any given assignment at any given
time , ALL moving , and adding to the resolution of the target
information  (  or contributing to mass multiple target surveillance
situations in a different mode of operation )  

like with cellfones but in reverse ......... as the sat or sats come
within view of a " target " area, they are switched from their
assignment of a few minutes ago and  " view "  their new assignment .
this because they are NOW in view of that / those targets. in other
words , this sat net  can cover the entire planet  24/7 with a limited
amount of resources  ( like GPS ) by smart switching and tight network
assignments and data collection / reflection.  no doubt some amount of
processing would happen on the bird net ( pre conditioning /
collection ) but the vast majority of the imaging assembly and  post
processing would happen on ground ( or sister processing sats also in
position and  working  sort of as collector / controller hubs on the
sat net  ( eliminating  some potential earth to ground  issues and
making it easy for earth station assets to locate and access the nets
< solar flares emp  etc. using  bird resources  shielded by the
earth's mass  >) .   

this has probably made things more confusing , but I hope it gives you
one scenario of how  nearly   any  ( every ? )  place on the entire
planet  "  could  "   have  multiple sarsat  imaging taking place 
24/7  ( from multiple angles from a  net of birds with many different 
perspectives and angles with simultaneous views )  and how this could
be accomplished with less resources than you ever thought possible  !
( since " they " thought up the GPS sat net, it just takes a moment to
leap to this thought next . and GPS has been around quite a while eh
!   ha ah ah a a   )
  

I'm not asserting this is fact, this is only a hypothetical discussion
using  obvious no-brainer  extrapolations  and drawing on current 
 well known technology  as well.