Betty seems to have been able to make out more from the transmissions than anyone else, including professional radio operators in the Pacific.
That's not a fair comparison. Betty and the other private citizen shortwave listeners who heard something they thought was Amelia Earhart were listening on a harmonic of Earhart's primary frequencies. The professional operators in the Pacific were listening on the primary frequencies. Apples and oranges.
That's a fair point, but doesn't Betty seem to have been able to make out more than the others? That could be because she had better reception, but why was that when she was so far away and relying on so many bounces off the ionosphere? I think I read that propagation analysis indicated that the probability of the signal having got to her was low.
I have a problem accepting Simon's arguement concerning Betty's notes: "I also have some scepticism about the reliability of the notes she wrote at the time. Human beings have a remarkable ability to make patterns out of randomness."
Keep in mind that the general belief at the time was that AE/FN were down at sea. Betty's notes clearly indicate that AE/FN were free to leave the plane because of rising tides, words to the effect the water is getting higher as they try to communicate, etc.
Reading Betty's notes give one the impression that AE was doing most of the talking and FN was in the background feeling somewhat poorly. Wouldn't the logical interpretation by a young girl be that either FN was busy getting them to shore safely or he was leaving the "frutless radio traffic" up to AE to keep her busy and out of his hair! Betty's memo indicates that AE was the one in charge not the guy which is/was contrary to the social norm of the day.
One gets that impression from the explanatory notes she wrote afterwards. What was actually written at the time is hard to interpret as we don't know who was saying what or what the context was. AE was the pilot and a feminist icon, so it would be reasonable to expect her to be the one in charge. Betty would not necessarily have had the sexist stereotypes you assume. Betty paints a very vivid picture in her commentary, but it's subject to the vagaries of human memory. I find it hard to believe that years later she remembered who said what or what was going on in the cockpit that wasn't written down at the time. If she had heard FN complaining about his head, why didn't she write it down at the time, but only years later?
If Betty's notes were indeed "patterns out of randomness" I would suggest that Simon revisit the sequential pattern exhibited in Betty's memo - there were periods of time where no transmissions were recorded, if Simon is correct would this be an ideal time for Betty to "fill in the blanks?" She didn't, she simply stopped and waited for the next transmission.
I didn't say that Betty was filling in the blanks. Betty was hearing something, but it was indistinct. If you hear something very faintly it is difficult to make out and lots of errors occur. It's clear from the notes that she was only getting snatches, so she was straining to make anything out. It is plausible that she was hearing AE, but I think people are placing too much weight on what she wrote given the difficulty of making anything out. Speculation about NY being Norwich City is interesting, but it's just speculation.
Finally, Betty did sugget to her Dad that her record should be sent over to the Coast Guard, if she was makinking all this up wouldl she do this?
I didn't say she was making it up. I think she heard something. She may well have heard AE. I said she was straining to make it out. We know that people make lots of errors then, unconsciously finding patterns and meaning in things. Here is what Sir Ernst Gombrich said about his experiences listening to radio transmissions during the Second World War:
I was employed for six years by the British Broadcasting Corporation in their "Monitoring Service," or listening post, where we kept constant watch on radio transmissions from friend and foe. It was in this context that the importance of guided projection in our understanding of symbolic material was brought home to me. Some of the transmissions which interested us most were barely audible, and it became quite an art, or even a sport, to interpret the few whiffs of speech sound that were all we really had on the wax cylinders on which these broadcasts had been recorded. It was then we learned to what extent our knowledge and expectations influence our hearing. You had to know what might be said in order to hear what was said. More exactly, you tried from your knowledge of possibilities certain word combinations and tried projecting them into noises heard. The problem was a twofold one---to think of possibilities and to retain one's critical faculty. . . . For this was the most striking experience of all: once your expectation was firmly set and your conviction settled, you ceased to be aware of your own activity, the noises appeared to fall into place and be transformed into the expected words. So strong was this effect of suggestion that we made it a practice never to tell a colleague our own interpretation if we wanted him to test it. Expectation created illusion.
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Topic: Could AE and FN have known it was named "Norwich City"? (Read 109909 times)
