He helped name Radio Shack. Then he built the radios that helped win the war.

The South Boston Kid Who Built the Radios That Helped Win World War II

The Hallicrafters Story, Part 1

William J. Halligan lost his father at age three, walked away from West Point, fought RCA in court, and built one of the most important companies in radio history. Most hams know the brand. Very few know the man.

I’ve been in ham radio for fifty years. I thought I knew the equipment history. I knew the brands, the model numbers, the rough timelines. Hallicrafters was a big one. A great one. The receivers they made in the thirties and forties were the gear you wanted if you were serious.

Then I started digging into the man who built the company and I realized I didn’t know anything. Not really. The brand was famous. The person behind it was almost completely invisible.

His name was William J. Halligan. He signed his letters “Willie.” He was one of the most important figures in the history of amateur radio, and almost nobody talks about him anymore. That ends today.

From the Hallicrafters Era

The SX-28 Super Skyrider became one of the iconic Hallicrafters receivers of the era. Photo: Daderot / Wikimedia Commons (CC0).

The Hallicrafters S-38A helped bring shortwave listening and ham radio within reach of a wider audience after the war. Photo: Badseed / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

South Boston, 1895

William John Halligan was born in South Boston in 1895. His father died when he was three years old. His mother raised him. That’s the foundation this whole story is built on: a kid from Southie with no safety net and something to prove.

He got into wireless early, the way a lot of young men did in the years after Marconi’s transatlantic signal. It wasn’t a career back then. It was barely a hobby. Just spark-gap transmitters and borrowed crystal sets and young men staying up past midnight trying to pull signals from the air. Halligan was one of those young men. By the time he was in his teens, people had started calling him “Wireless Willie.” The name stuck.

He went to West Point. Made it in, which was no small thing for a fatherless kid from South Boston. Then he left. He’d met a woman named Katherine, and he walked away from the academy to marry her. His classmates thought he’d lost his mind. Maybe he had. But he knew what he wanted and he went and got it. That was always his pattern.

After West Point he went to sea as a ship’s radio operator. He sailed on merchant vessels, working the wireless room, listening for signals in the static, earning his living with his ears. It was real work. Hard work. And it gave him something that no engineering school could: he understood radio the way a fisherman understands water. Not theoretically. Physically. He’d heard the bands change with the weather and the time of day. He knew what a good receiver felt like in your hands because he’d trusted his life to one.

The Name You Already Know

After his years at sea, Halligan came ashore and went to work in sales. Radio sales. He had a gift for it. He understood the customers because he was one of them. He ended up at a small outfit in Boston called Radio Shack, selling amateur radio equipment and ship’s radio gear out of a one-room shop at 46 Brattle Street.

You read that right. The same Radio Shack. Halligan was one of the people who named it. He borrowed the term from the slang hams already used for their operating rooms. A radio shack was where you kept your gear. The name felt right. It stuck.

He didn’t stay in Boston long. Halligan was already thinking bigger. He moved to Chicago in the late 1920s. The radio industry was booming and Chicago was the center of it. He went to work for a company called Silver-Marshall, a major manufacturer of radio parts and receivers. He sold their line on the road and learned the manufacturing side from the inside.

Then the Depression hit. Silver-Marshall, like almost every radio manufacturer in America, began to collapse. Halligan watched it happen from the inside. And somewhere in that collapse he made a decision. If the company he worked for was going to fall apart anyway, he might as well start his own.

Chicago, 1933

In 1933, at the bottom of the Great Depression, William Halligan founded the Hallicrafters Company in Chicago. The name was his own invention. He made it up. He wanted something that sounded technical and distinctive, something that didn’t sound like any company that had come before it. Hallicrafters. It worked.

His first product was the Super Skyrider, a shortwave receiver that targeted the serious amateur. The timing sounds crazy. Starting a manufacturing company in the deepest year of the Great Depression. But Halligan had worked the Silver-Marshall customer base long enough to know something: the ham radio operator who was serious about the hobby was going to find a way to buy good equipment no matter what the economy was doing. He wasn’t selling to casual hobbyists. He was selling to people who would skip lunch to save up for the right radio.

RCA wasn’t happy about any of this. They sued Hallicrafters almost immediately, claiming patent infringement on the superheterodyne circuit that was the heart of every modern receiver. RCA had been using the patent system as a weapon against smaller competitors for years. Most companies backed down or paid licensing fees that squeezed their margins to nothing.

Halligan fought them. The case dragged on for years. During the fight he kept manufacturing, kept selling, kept building his customer base. He survived the lawsuit. RCA eventually lost their stranglehold on the superheterodyne patents, and the competitive landscape cracked open. Halligan had already positioned himself to walk through the gap.

The Golden Years

By the late 1930s, Hallicrafters was the shortwave receiver company. The Sky Buddy, the Sky Chief, the Super SkyRider, the SX-28 and SX-28A. These weren’t just popular. They were the standard. If you were a serious ham, a shortwave listener, a ship’s radio officer, a newspaper foreign correspondent, or a government monitoring station, you owned a Hallicrafters.

The SX-28 deserves its own sentence. It was one of the finest communications receivers of its era, shipped to Allied forces, monitoring stations, and intelligence agencies across the world. Edward R. Murrow was broadcasting from London for CBS during the Blitz. His engineers were using Hallicrafters receivers to monitor the frequencies they worked around. The President of the United States got intelligence from monitoring posts using Hallicrafters equipment.

None of this happened by accident. Halligan hired good engineers and left them alone to build things that actually worked. He understood that his customers were technically sophisticated. You couldn’t sell a ham radio operator a mediocre receiver and expect them to come back. They’d open it up, look at the circuit design, and tell everyone they knew whether it was any good. His market was self-policing. So he built the real thing.

The SCR-299 and Kasserine Pass

When the United States entered the war, the Army needed mobile field radios that could operate from vehicles under combat conditions. Not bench equipment. Not shack gear. Radios that could bounce across the North African desert in the back of a truck and still work when you stopped and needed to call in an artillery strike.

Hallicrafters built the BC-779, which became the heart of the SCR-299 mobile communications set. Paired with a BC-375 transmitter, the SCR-299 went into the field on a truck and became one of the primary HF communications systems of the entire Allied ground campaign in North Africa.

February 1943. Kasserine Pass. Tunisia. American forces were overrun by German armor and in danger of complete collapse. The communications that held the line together, the equipment that let commanders coordinate a fighting withdrawal and then a counterattack, ran through Hallicrafters receivers. The North African campaign did not go well for us at first. But it went worse for the Germans in part because our communications held when our lines didn’t.

The D-Day deception operation, the elaborate Allied program to convince the Germans that the Normandy invasion was a feint, relied heavily on radio signals. The Germans were monitoring Allied communications, so the Allies fed them fake traffic. The equipment generating and monitoring that traffic included Hallicrafters receivers on both sides of the operation. The same company that started in Chicago in the Depression became a piece of the most ambitious military deception in history.

Wireless Willie had come a long way from the spark-gap sets of his Boston childhood.

The Ham Radio Connection

He Never Forgot Who He Was Building For

Here’s what makes Halligan different from a hundred other wartime manufacturers. He never stopped thinking about the ham radio market. While the Chicago plant was cranking out military equipment, he was already thinking about what hams would want when the war ended and the bands reopened.

He was a ham himself. W9WZE. When he talked about receiver performance and selectivity and sensitivity he wasn’t reading from a spec sheet. He was talking about what he heard through the headphones on his own bench. He understood the customer because he was the customer. That’s rare in any industry. It was nearly unique in the radio manufacturing business of the 1940s.

Next week, Part 2: the postwar golden age, a receiver on Air Force One, and the slow unraveling of one of the great names in ham radio history.

The Signal Report

What draws me to stories like this is the pattern. Halligan wasn’t a brilliant engineer. He wasn’t an inventor in the Edison mold. He was something harder to find and harder to replace: a person who genuinely understood his customer because he was his customer, and who had the stubbornness to build the real thing instead of the cheap thing.

That combination, real knowledge of the market plus the will to build something worthy of it, is rarer than most people think. I’ve watched a lot of companies in this hobby over the years. The ones that lasted were run by people who actually used what they sold. The ones that lost their way were the ones where that connection broke.

Halligan never lost it. At least not in this part of the story. Come back next week for the rest.

73 de N2LEE

I’m Lee, N2LEE.  ·  Founder, Ham Radio Gizmos / Ham Radio Wayback Machine

HF Propagation Intelligence  ·  June 12–14, 2026

This Weekend on the Bands

Source: NOAA SWPC 3-Day Forecast  ·  Issued June 12, 2026 at 0030 UTC

What This Actually Means for Your Weekend

This is not a dead-bands forecast. It is a “keep one hand on the band switch” forecast. Friday should be usable with unsettled periods. Saturday is the troublemaker: NOAA expects G2 levels around 0600–0900 UTC, with additional G1-level periods later in the day. Sunday should begin improving, but G1 conditions may still show up as the CME effects fade.

The big caution is radio blackout risk. NOAA gives R1–R2 blackouts a 45 percent chance each day this weekend, with a 10 percent chance of an isolated R3 event, mostly tied to flare potential from Region 4465. Translation: sunlit-path HF can suddenly go soft, especially on higher frequencies. The bands may not fail politely. They may just leave the room.

Market Intelligence  ·  Powered by HRG Blue Book℠ Data

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As of June 5, 2026  ·  90-Day Window  ·  QRZ, QTH & eBay completed listings

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The Director’s Cut

If you’d rather listen, I recorded the longer version of the Halligan story where I go deeper into what the RCA lawsuit actually looked like from the inside, and why the Silver-Marshall back-channel mattered more than most people realize. It’s a little slower, a little more like sitting across a table. Not available publicly. Just for you.

Coming Up in the Wayback Machine

Next week…

73 de N2LEE

Lee, N2LEE  ·  Founder, Ham Radio Gizmos / Ham Radio Wayback Machine

HAM RADIO WAYBACK MACHINE · HRG WEEKLY · ISSUE 5

HRG BLUE BOOK℠ IS A SERVICE MARK OF HAM RADIO GIZMOS

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