I had posted this in the navigation forum, but I realized that it was probably the kind of thing that more properly belonged in its own thread. At the risk of turning things too speculative, I want to ask a question I asked once before, 10 years ago.
In the jumble of numbers and letters that inexplicably fill Betty's Notebook, which purports to be a fragmentary transcription of a weak radio reception from Earhart, there are several entries that, if you sound them out phonetically (as they were heard), are consistent with broadcasting a LOP of 158-338:
"158 mi. "
"58 338"
"fig 8 - 3. 30"
"Z 38"
"38-3 "
"3"
"30"
By my count, of the 12 fragmentary number transcriptions, that's seven that are consistent with hearing a fragment of someone saying the phrase "one fifty eight three thirty eight," including two that are nearly complete transcriptions of that phrase,
once you sound them out phonetically, which is exactly how fragments like this would be transcribed. Given that I work in sound design, I've always thought that one of the key things about Betty's Notebook to understand is that without context, it's hard to work out what any one fragment of a word really means. We all experience this when we try to understand a conversation without knowing the topic, or can't hear some of the words. Is it a Z or a 3? Did someone call for someone named Steve, or was that the first part of "stevedore." Absent any frame of reference, "Norwich City" could easily be interpreted as "New York City," in fact it would be more likely, because given an unknown quantity we will generally default to something familiar. You have to factor that in if you are trying to interpret something like this -- not just what might have been being transmitted, but what was being actually heard and how that would be interpreted by someone that had no frame of reference to guess at what the whole of the sentence might be.
I realize that this is speculative, but to me it's also very striking since the numbers themselves always struck me as something it was improbable a hoaxer would come up with, since it's too obscure and would tend to make people DISbelieve the message (as, indeed, they have). And AE repeating the line of position in the message both makes some sense in terms of revealing their position, and also give us some sense of what about half of those numbers, mistranscribed in phonetic and fragmentary fashion, might mean.
So here's my question: would there be any reason at all for the LOP to be shifted by one degree if AE was indeed transmitting them? I seem to recall that no one could think of any when I first posed this question. But the repetition of variations of those two numbers, once you sound out the transcription aloud and account for how garbled the transmission would have been, is very striking to me.
postscript: I understand that some pooh-pooh Betty's Notebook outright or view it with a great deal of skepticism, and believe that any walk down the speculation road is a fool's errand. That is fine. My personal opinion is that since there is a distinct possibility that BN is genuine (as there has been no evidence that it isn't other than the long odds of the reception itself), then it's worthwhile to think these kinds of things through as we may find unexpected light through analyzing them. If the transmission happened, the numbers mean
something. Which is my way of saying that, having acknowledged this, blanket responses saying this is too deep in the weeds and these kinds of questions shouldn't be bothered to be asked are in no way helpful.
If AE broadcast the line of position altered by one degree to help people find their location, then it's an odd enough occurrence that deducing the reason for it could conceivably advance the hypothesis in terms of how the flight ended and how they got on Niku, or where they thought they were.