Our first ‘big’ one on Tenerife, Roque del Conde carries 8 points for a successful activation with another 3 points available for doing it in winter. And yes, I can’t believe I’m writing that as I sit here with the air conditioning cranked up, nursing a mild touch of sun.

Ascent

We’d earmarked some easy parking in Arona but decided to take a quick peek at Vento instead on our way to the trailhead, and found a spot just a few hundred yards from the start of our chosen route, not too near the local residents who must get fed up with this sort of thing judging by the number of makeshift ‘bollards’ outside one house.

The route we took led eastwards out of Vento into a small gorge, and then up through disused farmland along well-made rocky paths. After half an hour or so of easy walking the gradient increased and developed a sequence of switch-backs, but by then it was almost light enough to turn off our torches and navigate by daylight. In total we took 1h 25m to climb 426m over 3.26 km, and it was all fairly easy, but I was still glad I’d ditched my flight-case and jammed all the radio gear into my rucksack today.

Summit

The top of Roque del Conde is exactly as you’d imagine it from the Costa below; a fairly good sized plateau with plenty of room to move about. This meant that in order to survey the surrounding valleys and rolling clouds we had to walk about a bit first, and seeing as it was just us by that point I decided to last my pole to the trig point itself, hoping that I’d not made some kind of SOTA faux pas. Also worth noting that until we entered the plateau I had been enjoying almost perfect reception from my portable SHARI node, which was running from a battery pack on the hotel balcony way down below. Amazing bit of kit!

Today’s SOTA setup was again the EFHW for 40m, Icom IC-705 with tuner, and the ID-52 for VHF / UHF. My confidence in this setup is growing each day, and I left behind the just-in-case 20/40 Bandhopper and my JPC-12 vertical. Having deployed the EFHW on Roque de Jama two days ago I can’t imagine a summit too small now, though no doubt that day will come.

Contacts

I scanned 40m as soon as I had the wire up and there were a few stations rolling about, but that seemed to dry up quite quickly as the daylight increased. At home I’m used to 40m long skip giving way to EU and then inter-G, but I guess out here there’s no equivalent to inter-G and it all goes quiet on 40. 20m was jumping though, and it took me a while to find a clear space near the QRP centre. I put a spot out and soon had some people coming back to my call, including callsigns familiar from the past two days. Some very dedicated chasers out there!

Nobody from Japan this time, but Ukraine, Slovenia, Slovak Republic and Austria were all well represented, as well as more local EU stations. The icing on the cake for me at that point was Alex GM5ALX/P whose spot I picked up on the tracker, and managed to work a Summit-to-Summit of 3,400 km all the way to Scotland! Bet I was warmer than him. Once I’d reeled in 24 contacts in 16 countries I packed up the antenna just as the first hikers arrived, and wanted to know if we’d camped up here!

We took another walk around the plateau in order to see if I could get my SHARI node again, and I came across Raúl EA8AMT on 145.525 all the way from El Hierro, another island in the canaries, and my second S2S contact today. Absolutely amazing.

Descent

By the time I’d finished with Raúl there were maybe 12 or 15 people on the summit, climbing on the trig point and generally milling about where my antennas was half an hour earlier. Guessing that there would be more hikers making their way up via the same route which we had taken, we resolved to try and find the other way off Roque Del Conde, and that turned out to be quite a challenging descent, with many opportunities to crawl down backwards while holding on with both hands. I was more glad than ever that I’d stuffed my radio gear into my camera bag for this hike and left the Fuji X-T5 behind, because I don’t think I’d have gotten down here in one piece while carrying a flight case. The return route is shown as a northerly track on the embedded map below, which then flattens out eastwards and rejoins the original trail for a few short meters before ending up back in Vento. I’m very glad we did it this way around.

Summary

A brilliant morning of SOTA, with Roque del Conde nowhere hear as daunting as we may have imagined from the safety of our hotel balcony. The paths to the summit were good enough to have ascended in complete darkness, though it was light enough to switch the torches off 45 minutes before sunrise and we enjoyed an easy hike all the way. The northerly route would have been an altogether different story, at least for a net-new activation. Glad we got lucky and did it this way around, culminating with another summit in the bag and the mother of all club sandwiches for breakfast afterwards. With sangria. Cheers!

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Today we activated a peak close to our hotel on Costa Adeje, TF-016 Guaza. It was another early start and we had intentions of getting up to the top well before sunrise, but our chosen parking location near a local garage turned out to be quite busy despite the time of day, so we looked around for somewhere more discreet and found a nice spot just down the road. Unfortunately this meant walking back up the unlit, busy road without a verge, so we were very glad when we found what looked like an alternative path to the summit.

Ascent

In hindsight we should have just taken the road and stuck with plan A, but after yesterday’s easy jaunt up TF-014 we were feeling confident and headed out into the scrub with our torches. It soon became apparent that this was the kind of ‘path’ where you need occasional use of both hands, and, ideally, daylight. The climb took us just under an hour and was a bit sketchy in places, so definitely not one to recommend. (it’s the south-westerly path in the embedded map below, following Tableros de Guaza)

The other disadvantage of not sticking to our original route (nor consulting a contour map) is that our ad-hoc ascent took us to the wrong summit, though getting to the right one was merely a matter of following a short dirt road. By now it was just light enough to see without the use of torches, and as the moon went down behind us the sun rose behind Guaza proper.

Summit

There’s a veritable forest of commercial antennas up on Guaza and I was concerned at the possibility of QRM, though on the plus side there should also be a fairly decent access road to follow down. In the end we had no difficulty with man-made noise, though the 40m band was a tad quiet. Put that down to conditions.

The six metre Tactical Mini was deployed with some bungees to a dead cactus, and I strung up my 40m EFHW a little distance from the commercial installation and the obvious tracks leading through it. In the time we were up there we only saw a couple of walkers, but the summit’s proximity to town probably makes it quite busy at times.

Contacts

The contacts came flooding in after a bit of self-spotting (good phone signal up near those masts!) and in 1h 21m I worked 26 stations all over Europe. Conditions didn’t seem to be as good as they were yesterday though we heard one Japanese station in QSO with somebody else. ZL and VK were also out there apparently but not heard by me. Speaking of which, I still think I need to improve my EFHW’s reception somehow because even on 10w I’m being heard far better than I’m able to receive. Tried twiddling with the filters a bit but without a set of headphones it was ultimately not helpful.

Descent

By the time I’d packed everything up it was getting quite warm, and with the arduous ascent behind us we forgot all about taking the long access road down, and instead went to look for the route which we should have taken on the way up. Thankfully it was quite easy to find and yes, would have made for a much easier ascent. It’s the north-south path in the embedded map below, and I strongly recommend it over the other way.

Summary

A great morning of SOTA despite difficulty in getting up the hill. The lesson here is to have a reliable route in place and stick to it, especially when carrying too much equipment in the dark. I looked back at the activity recorded by my Garmin fitness tracker and in terms of exercise load the ascent was roughly on par with a brisk 5 km run. Good to know.

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