The folowing excerpt was taken from the book A Founders Touch, The Life of Paul Gavin of Motorola, 1965, a biography of Motorola’s founder, and reprinted at http://mfwright.com/mikeht220/hthistory.html:

But the real impetus for the beginning of Motorola’s great war contributions came in early 1940 when Royal Munger, then financial editor for the Chicago Daily News, who was a reserve army officer, called Galvin. He told him that the National Guard then maneuvering in war games at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin were hampered for lack of radio communications.

Galvin sent Don Mitchell, his chief engineer, and Ray Yoder to Camp McCoy. During the inspection, Mitchell saw the heavy and cumbersome back-pack radios the Army was using for communications. “That’s no kind of equipment with which to fight a war,” Mitchell told Col. Leland H. Stanford of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. “I think we can provide better radios for that purpose.”