Prompted by porterhouse's comments on Amelia's radio operation I was interested to investigate solar activity for the time - this can have a
significant impact on hf radio operation.
It turns out that July was the highest month on record in the Pacific for 1937, and that 1937 was the peak year for that particular cycle.
This site and
this site refer.
I'm not sure it's the right place to debate the possible effects of this here, it's quite a complex subject, but suffice it to say that it perhaps lends some possibility towards some reception reports that might otherwise be dismissed. Conversely it could also introduce difficulties for Amelia, particularly if she was unfamiliar with such things.
Quite probably this has been thought of before and done to death, but between this and the difficulty of correctly operating a fixed-frequency transmitter and a variable-frequency receiver together it seems to me a likely recipe for the ensuing mess - both in terms of whatever happened, and in any later rescue/recovery/research...
FP.