Technically there's not really such a thing as "Not being able to receive the signal at all", the signal is there it is just (many thousands of times) lower than the noise floor and almost impossible to recover. There are information theoretic tricks you can do with the shape of the signal to still fit a few bits/second in there but it is going to be pretty low. GPS and other satellite navigation systems are probably the most prevalent systems that do this; the satellites don't have all that much power but receivers make it work even with very small antennas.