I know no more about it technically than you. It can't pick up small wooden boats though so cannot help our patrol boats in the Timor Sea. They started playing with the idea 50 years ago and I believe it has been disappointing.
I urge you to think about focus though. Without it, we get sensory overload. You tune your radio so you can hear one, and only one station. If some poor smuck is transmitting an SOS on the next channel, you don't hear him. Nobody can say to you "But you had your radio on, why didn't you hear and respond?" There are thousands of stocks in the market so you use a filter to exclude all but a few you examine yourself. The sky is too big for any technology to "see it all". If MH370 wasn't transmitting, and it wasn't, there would be no reason for anyone to concentrate their efforts on "empty" sky.
