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.
| Time | Callsign | Band | Mode | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 08:58 | DL8DXL | 14MHz | SSB | s43 r33 |
| 08:59 | ON4FI | 14MHz | SSB | s53 r55 |
| 09:01 | ON7ZM | 14MHz | SSB | s44 r44 |
| 09:02 | OK2PDT | 14MHz | SSB | s55 r55 |
| 09:03 | DL1EBR | 14MHz | SSB | s59 r59 |
| 09:04 | IK2ECC | 14MHz | SSB | s59 r59 |
| 09:06 | SQ9CWO | 14MHz | SSB | s31 r44 |
| 09:07 | DL1EJG | 14MHz | SSB | s55 r55 |
| 09:07 | UT5PI | 14MHz | SSB | s55 r55 |
| 09:08 | OM3CND | 14MHz | SSB | s55 r57 |
| 09:10 | EA3EVL | 14MHz | SSB | s53 r53 |
| 09:11 | EA6/M0DLL | 14MHz | SSB | s55 r55 |
| 09:13 | OE5JKL | 14MHz | SSB | s53 r53 |
| 09:14 | S58AL | 14MHz | SSB | s51 r54 |
| 09:15 | F4GYM | 14MHz | SSB | s57 r53 |
| 09:16 | S52RA | 14MHz | SSB | s53 r55 |
| 09:17 | I1EEW | 14MHz | SSB | s43 r44 |
| 09:18 | CT7BOD | 14MHz | SSB | s55 r55 |
| 09:18 | M7HGO | 14MHz | SSB | s55 r54 |
| 09:19 | EA2CKX | 14MHz | SSB | s43 r43 |
| 09:26 | GM5ALX/P | 14MHz | SSB | s43 r31 |
| 09:35 | CR5WWA | 18MHz | SSB | s59 r59 |
| 09:50 | EA8AMT | 144MHz | FM | s55 r59 – ID-52 stock antenna 5w |
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!
