boratories at Williamsville, NY, and San Juan, PR, the packaged proto- type was finally delivered for shipboard testing in 1962. Such a system was evidently carried into the blockade associated with the Cuban missile crisis, but a radio silence order prevented its use. In 1963, BLADES was installed on the command flagship Mt. McKinley for operational development tests. Successful full-duplex field trials over intercontinental distances were observed by Sylvania engineer Gerry Meiler, who disembarked at Rota, Spain, leaving the system in the hands of Navy personnel. Further into the Mediterranean, intentional jamming was encountered, and BLADES pro- vided the only useful communication link for the McKinley. Thus, BLADES was quite likely the earliest FH-SS communication system to reach an oper- ational state. 2.2.5 Noise Wheels At the end of World War II, ITT reorganized and constructed a new facil- ity at Nutley, NJ, incorporated as Federal Telecommunication Laboratories (FTL), with Henri Busignies as Technical director. There, in 1946, a group of engineers in Paul Adam's R-16 Laboratory began working on long-range navigation and communication techniques to meet the requirements of the expanding intercontinental air traffic industry. In the available frequency bands, it was expected that multipath generated by signal ducting between the ionosphere and the earth would cause significant distortion, while the prime source of independent interference at the receiver would consist of atmospheric noise generated for the most part by lightning storms in the tropics. A major effort was initiated to study the statistical properties of the interference and to learn how to design high performance detectors for sig- nals competing with this interference. This was the situation in 1948 when Shannon's communication philoso- phy, embracing the idea that noise-like signals could be used as bearers of information, made a distinct impression on FTL engineers. Mortimer Rogoff, one of the engineers in R-16 at the time, was an avid ph