Scintillation estimates obtained from in-situ irregularity measurements by OGO-6 are compared with simultaneous 137 MHz and 6 GHz scintillations recorded at equatorial stations in the American and African sectors. In this first such correlated study, it is found that the equatorial irregularity amplitudes in these sectors are so large that for a moderately thick irregularity layer the commomly observed monotonic power law spectrum with outer scale dimensions much larger than the Fresnel dimension at VHF can explain the observed GHz scintillations and can locate the VHF band in the saturated scintillation regime. This finding is in contrast to other numerical modelling attempts which usually call for artificial tailoring of irregularity spectra to account for the observed GHz scintillations.