Unless you forget the transmission by the phone and hook them upto transceivers that will do what you want, you can still use a phone but as the processing part of your project, hook them upto a pair of trascievers using simple interfaces and then do all the decoding in the phone using a custom app.
Go browse around the amateur radio websites as they will have done this already, the data languages are already written as are the encoders\decoders so all you have to do is hook them up as modules in your custom program.
So to me it is clear that it WILL work.
Go google