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Earhart Project Research Bulletin June 5, 2002 |
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The radio logs of the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca are the only contemporaneous records of the last contacts with the Earhart flight. Understanding what they say and the context in which they were written is essential to any investigation of the disappearance. This research bulletin provides downloadable PDF images of the original logs; renderings into plain English of the “radio-ese” in which they were written; background on the physical layout of the Itasca’s radio room; background on the personnel and logging system aboard Itasca; a glossary of radio terminology; excerpts from the government radio traffic pertaining to the flight; and an analysis of the all-important 0843 message. |
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Why We Did This The Itasca radio logs were written in a shorthand style common to radio operators of the time. Sown liberally with technical terminology and idiosyncracy, they are all but unintelligible to the casual reader. Add in the strikeovers, errors, underlinings, notes, and highlighting and you have a visual nightmare: Here’s what these two entries say:
The 0824 message was sent in Morse code. In order to facilitate understanding of the situation and messages, we have organized the available material into categories.
In order to keep your sanity intact through this complex journey, we recommend that you read the Background section first and then go through the plain English translations of the two logs, remembering that they are independent, near real-time, descriptions of the same sequence of events. You may wish to download and print out the original logs to check against the translations and the analysis. |
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