Hello, Nine Fives — a blog for RF test engineers

Welcome to the Nine Fives engineering blog. This is where we’ll write about the things we care about: RF test automation, instrumentation, SCPI, HiSLIP, REST control planes, and the work of making test equipment that engineers actually want to use.

This first post does double duty — it’s a hello, and a tour of everything the blog can render.

Code, with real syntax highlighting

Posts can embed code blocks with syntax highlighting, a copy button, titled frames, and line highlighting. Here’s driving a POE-ATTEN over SCPI:

import pyvisa

rm = pyvisa.ResourceManager()
atten = rm.open_resource("TCPIP::poe-atten.local::hislip0::INSTR")

for db in range(0, 32, 2):
    atten.write(f":ATTenuation {db}")
    print(f"set {db} dB ->", atten.query(":ATTenuation?").strip())

atten.close()

Inline code like :ATTenuation? renders in the brand’s monospace style too.

Images, optimized automatically

Drop an image next to the post and import it — Astro runs it through Sharp, emitting responsive srcsets and lazy-loading by default:

Live, interactive demos

This is the part that makes the blog worth building. Any post can embed a real React or Three.js component that hydrates in the browser — great for visualizing RF paths, S-parameters, or 3D hardware. Drag to orbit:

The demo above only ships JavaScript because it opted in with client:visible. The rest of this page is static HTML.

Video

Self-hosted <video> works, and for YouTube we use a click-to-load facade so the heavy player script never loads until you press play:

What’s next

We’ll be publishing deep dives on test automation and the engineering behind our hardware. Subscribe via RSS to follow along.