JD-EE
"HN39, I'd also note that you ain't gonna stream via VHF out where the plane was no matter WHERE its antenna is. 100nm is about it for VHF give or take a factor of two. (I'm not going to bother to go look it up on the nomographs I have.)"
Where AF447 was it was out of range of VHF and ADS-B, and didn't have HF ACARS. It doesn't look like their is much amateur monitoring of ADS-B in that area.
In terms of previous ACARS messages I suspect there would have been VACARS transmitted via VHF3 prior to SATCOM.
The A330 Comm manual says that "ACARS normally transmits via VHF3. It automatically switches to SATCOM when VHF3 is not available."
Not quite sure if that means ACARS switches automatically when it is no longer receiving ACARS msgs via VHF3, or if by unavailable they mean something else.