Although self-educated, he was a member of a small, creative team which some attributed to the developing the world's first true radar system.

To receive stations, he learned the Morse code, and soon built his own spark-gap transmitter, joining the ranks of amateur radio enthusiasts in the pre-license days.

Young was assigned to the District Communications Office at Great Lakes, Illinois, where Albert Hoyt Taylor was the Director.

Taylor was also an amateur radio operator (call sign 9YN), and he and Young began a personal and professional relationship that existed for the rest of their lives.

One of Young's projects of the ARL was in developing amplitude modulation for transmitters, allowing audio communications as an alternate to Morse code.

Gregory Breit and Merle A. Tuve at the Carnegie Institution of Washington were studying the characteristics of the ionosphere (then called the Kennelly–Heaviside layer) using a transmitter built at the NRL.

[2] In 1930, Lawrence A. Hyland, another member of Taylor's team dating back to Great Lakes, was testing an antenna and observed interference from a passing aircraft.

Reminded of the 1922 observation of a similar nature, Taylor and Young submitted a report titled "Radio-Echo Signals from Moving Objects," and again suggested that this might be used for detection purpose.

The report slowly made its way through the bureaucracy in Washington, and in early 1932 was forwarded to the Army's Signal Corps Laboratories where it fell on "deaf ears."

Taylor convinced the NRL Director to allow an internally funded low-level project on interference-based detection.

A number of earlier devices, dating back to 1904, had been developed for detecting remote objects, but none of these measured the distance (range) to the target; thus, they were not radar systems.