During the War Years, small teams of engineers were developing revolutionary single sideband radio apparatus for military and commercial applications. One GE engineer, Donald E. Norgaard (W2KUJ and later, W6VMH, when he moved to California), was very enthusiastic of his research and wished to introduce this new bandwidth-saving technology to radio amateurs. Of course, such a new mode of operation faced an uphill battle with the status quo, so equipment for amateur experimentation had to be both simple in operation and easy to construct.

The results of Norgaard’s pioneering work were published in General Electric’s Ham News and were introduced to the world in November 1950 as the SSB, Jr. Of course, it is one thing to transmit single sideband, but what about reception? Don fixed that problem, too, by introducing a companion Signal Slicer in the July 1951 issue of Ham News. Many hundreds of SSB, Jrs were homebrewed by eager hams and the uniqueness of single side caught the attention of Wes Schum. In fact, Wes and Don’s work had very close parallels, but the SSB, Jr and the Slicer were, in fact, a complete system and that got Wes’ full attention.