OK, so where was I?

The station had been shut down since the end of NAQP Phone on 18-Aug due to work and family considerations, but I found some time to fire up the Flex 1500 and K3 and tune around a bit Sunday afternoon (3-Nov).

Got around to configuring the Flex using some recommended settings I found on the Flexradio email reflector, and it seems to help a lot with the latency and raspy CW audio issues I was experiencing. So I tuned around a bit with that but made no contacts.

Switched over to the K3 and came across the Wake Island DXpedition on 20m phone. Didn't actually hear K9W, only the lunatics and lids making fools of themselves calling on the DX frequency rather than up 5-10 as indicated in EVERY. SINGLE. CLUSTER. SPOT. Shook my head, moved on.

Soon found the Easter Island DXpedition (XR0YY) on 17m phone. The band was going in and out, I could barely hear him and even with the KPA500 kicked in he clearly wasn't hearing me, either. So I figured I'd missed my chance on this one since they're scheduled to close down operations before next weekend. Oh well.

Back on 20m I found ZD8O (Ascension Island) fairly strong on CW. Got him on first call (did I mention how much I love the KPA500?), new one (#144) in the log .

Had a little time Monday morning (04-Nov) around 1230 UTC before getting ready for work and saw in a post on Google+ that XR0YY was on 20m phone, so I took my coffee into the shack and dialed it up. There he was, fairly clear with not too many people calling. I dropped my call a few times and got him. #145 in the log!

This evening (05-Nov UTC) I found and worked ZF2KG (Cayman Islands) on 40 CW. Not a new one for me, but needed on both 40m and CW.

Back up to 20m, I got 9L1BTB (Sierra Leone) on CW and FR5HA (Reunion Is.) on PSK for #146 and #147 -- the latter had been evading me all summer, kept seeing him on PSK Reporter but never while I was at the radio. Nice to finally get that one in the log.

So five QSOs, four new DXCC notches on the belt, and I'm wondering why I stayed away from the rig for almost 3 months.