NavList:

Peter, you wrote:
"Nothing heroic is required in the way of equipment: an all-coverage shortwave receiver and a laptop with sound input running a spectrum analyzer is more than sufficient."

That may not be heroic, but it goes well beyond the sort of "anyone can do it" emergency navigation suggestion that you'll find in many modern resources.

When I looked into this last year, I found a list showing active AM stations in the Pacific. I don't have the link anymore, but I recall it claimed that there was only one AM radio station broadcasting on Tahiti, and it was relatively low-power. The rest are FM signals and presumably not suitable for direction-finding without special gear. It's certainly true that you could pick up very distant AM stations, especially at night, but of course the fix accuracy falls off in direct proportion to distance. If you're trying to find an island that's a hundred miles away, in some unknown direction, those distant bearings won't help much.

-FER

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