I guarantee they can be programmed to carry out missions without sending and receiving signals. Otherwise they can always be detected.

I don’t think you can realistically detect predator - satellite comms

Unless they have a specialized directional antenna, it's simple to triangulate where the source of a signal is with drones.

They fly pretty high and the antenna points towards the sky not the ground, and yes they do use specialised antennas. You'd much easier find a predator using radar.

I'd be curious to know how is the latency handled when it comes to aiming & shooting over a satellite connection.

Watch some of the videos on youtube, it's quite interesting. You can see that the predator is able to target and track automatically so the pilot basically just has to hit the button to fire the weapons and a hit is almost guaranteed. No need to have good reflexes or low latency. The pilots are in Nevada so the best case scenario is probably 100ms pings anyway.

Why? Obviously the satellite can detect the predator.