About Wisco Radio Labs

I'm Travis Engh, K9MTE (my callsign). I run Wisco Radio Labs — a one-person maker brand building tools for the amateur-radio community. My background runs from military maintenance and systems work into software engineering, information security, leadership positions, and now load management in the power industry — years of hands-on discipline that taught me to build things that are repairable, legible, and honest about what they do and don't do.

That path is what pulled me into ham radio. Working on software, and then on securing it, turned into a genuine love of building hardware and the software that makes it run — and radio is where those two finally meet.

I started Wisco Radio Labs because I wanted a place to build radio things in the open and share the work. The first product is the CW Trainer — a Morse-code training app built the way I wanted to learn: Koch method, real copy and sending practice, and a QSO simulator that feels like an actual contact. I built it for myself and decided it was worth sharing.

I'll be straight with you: I don't operate CW on the air yet. I've tried, and that's the whole reason this exists — I built the trainer to learn it properly and get the confidence to actually call CQ: to put out a call and have a real conversation. I'm not an expert handing down lessons; I'm a guy building the tool he needs, in the open.

"Made in the Driftless" is a place and a posture. The Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin is a specific place — old hills and river valleys, stubbornly themselves while the rest of the midwest was flattened and then sprawled. That's the attitude. Build it well. Make it repairable. Show the work.

This site is the bench log: what I'm building, how it's going, and what I got wrong the first time. More projects are in progress.