Earhart disappeared 16 years after the Titanic went down. By that time one would think wireless to be standard equipment aboard larger ships as shown in that photo. Would Earhart have kept mum under the circumstances, or would she instead have sought any way possible to communicate here whereabouts? Why not take a vessel back to safe harbor and then home?
I simply don’t believe the ship in the picture has anything to do with Erhart’s crash site.
I’ve been to her home town many times. Worked for an old family who ran a distribution business there.
There are lots of efforts to piece the crash together. Her plane did have a radio, trailing wire operation. She had a radio operator on board too.
Here are some records related:
https://tighar.org/wiki/Transmissions_heard_from_NR16020
Sounds like they used a mixture of AM phone and CW transmissions. That was the extent of the equipment of the day. AM phone is not good for weak signal conditions. CW is usually much much better, with weak signals.
Distance between stations and time of day makes a huge difference on High Frequency signals. (HF is not very high now.) They were operating using 3.1 mhz and 6.2 mhz frequencies.