What is interesting about this one is the "ship on reef" which could be interpreted to mean the aircraft, commonly called a ship in the 30's, or the Norwich City, literally a ship on the reef. South of equator, and southeast of Howland are both excellent descriptions if you don't have exact coordinates to give, your navigator has suffered a head injury or has otherwise gone bonkers, and that is all you know.
Same with the Betty notes, I find that there are quite a few oddities that in a vacuum she wouldn't have come up with, but the New York City getting repeated over and over could easily have been AE's attempt to give the best info she could on her location. Anyone looking up the Norwich City could have figured out where it ended up. There is logic to it in the context of Earhart that doesn't otherwise make sense.
Gary, isn't this exactly the kind of info you are arguing she would have broadcast?
Andrew
No, the name of some ship wreck (assuming she could even determine its name) was not the best info she could give about her location. If I were Earhart I would have said that I was on one of the Phoenix islands since it was our plan, mine and Noonan's, to fly southeast to get to that group of islands when we couldn't find Howland which
is the TIGHAR theory. Earhart and Noonan knew those islands were there or else they would have desperately continued searching for Howland (and Baker) if those were the only islands they knew about.
So after following the TIGHAR plan "B" they end up on Gardner Island, one of he Phoenix group, and after landing (safely enough so as to not damage the plane enough to prevent running the engine) do you think they suddenly forgot that they had been flying to the Phoenix islands? Why would they be sending cryptic messages about the name of a ship when they knew they were in the Phoenix's? Do you think they would try to hide the ball like they were hiding the ball when they crossed their fingers behind their backs and sent the message about their fuel state, keeping it secret that they meant until their fuel reserve? Come on! And why didn't she write down the numbers that she says she thinks she heard since, as I pointed out before, the critical nature of location information is obvious to everybody including teenage girls?
I suggest that what Betty heard was a combination of broadcasts on close together frequencies, one fading in while another faded out, one of which talked about New York, she was tuning to an international broadcast band, don't forget, and many stations broadcast on adjacent frequencies. Those old tube radios had poor selectivity (the ability to keep out signals on close frequencies) especially on the higher frequency bands as anybody who has spent any time listening to short wave radios can attest.
And remember, even with Brandenburg's finest efforts he could only get the probability that Betty could have even have heard Earhart up only one chance in 1.4 million, about like your winning the lottery.
I have avoided getting into the weeds of radio propagation up til now but we need to look at it in regards to Betty. I have pointed out several times that Brandenburg refuses to tell us his assumptions and methods but as to his analysis of Betty he did give us some of this information. In his
Harmony and Power paper he discusses the assumption he made for the required Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and he assumed that it only required a 43 dB SNR for Betty to hear Earhart however this assumption is not warranted as it is not supported by standard reference works. I have attached two such standards and they both have the same table specifying that for a double side band AM signal, which is the kind of signal we are talking about, the required SNR is 51 dB. I know your eyes are rolling back and you are saying "what's the difference, 51..43 it's only a difference of 8, what's the big deal?" Without getting into the details of the decibel scale (you can Google it if you want) a difference of 8 dB means a power ratio of a little bit more than 6 which means that Brandenburg's computation was basically assuming that Earhart had a transmitter that put out over 300 watts instead of its actual output of only 50 watts. Or to look at it another way, in order for him to get to even the 1.4 million to one odds
against Betty hearing Earhart, Brandenburg is assuming that Betty came to Earth with Jar-El from Krypton with super hearing so that she can hear a mouse fart ten miles away. If he had used the correct value of 51 dB SNR then the odds of her hearing Earhart get much worse than the already highly unlikely odds of 1.4 million against.
And do you think Earhart had to give her
EXACT coordinates?
'"Chief Bellarts?
"What is it now, Galten?"
"Well, I keep hearing a woman's voice repeating just one word, 'Phoenix...Phoenix...Phoenix'"
"Oh, just ignore that, don 't even bother to log it, it's probably just some dizzy dame looking for a beauty shop in Arizona."
"Sure thing, don't log it, aye, aye."
gl