Long-range wireless communication necessarily limits you to shortwave bands, exclusively if you don't have satellites. Earhart most certainly had a shortwave tr

Long-range wireless communication necessarily limits you to shortwave bands, exclusively if you don't have satellites. Earhart most certainly had a shortwave transceiver onboard. It is totally plausible and unsurprising that hams in the United States would have been able to hear Earhart's distress calls. Additionally, this was in the age before vacuum tubes opened up frequencies higher than HF for widespread commercial use -- for example UHF (used for television broadcasts) was still largely experimental around the time Earhart disappeared. So consumer wireless devices were still mostly clustered in and around the shortwave bands.