We should have known that Rojar would be busy since it’s quite close to the coast (and therefore tourist population) but I didn’t anticipate that the crowds would be up so early.
We arrived a good half hour before sunrise and already there were a couple of people sitting on the trig point, with more arriving at regular intervals. Too busy then to lash the pole against any of the few man-made structures on the summit, and attempts at guying a free-standing setup also failed because I couldn’t get my pegs into the rocky ground.
To make matters worse, I discovered that the sturdy looking bushes I’d been using to keep my backpack and jacket off the abrasive ground were actually quite fragile, and bled copious amounts of sticky white liquid all over our stuff. Oops.
We spent 20 minutes calling CQ on 2m after getting a self-spot out, but all I had was the ID-52 with stock antenna and it was ultimately unsuccessful. Packed up, headed down the same way we came.
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!
2m FM S2S with Raúl EA8AMTAnd this is why we start early
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!
Since buying the ID-52 I haven’t been using it much outside of the shack because I’ve not been able to find a suitable screen protector, which is pretty much the first accessory that I add to any portable toy with a display. Especially when that display marks as easily as it does on Icom’s latest greatest handheld – minor scratches are already visible after 6 weeks of indoor use when all I’ve done is wipe off the occasional fingerprint with a clean microfibre cloth. But I digress.
Close, but no Cigar
Brotect AirGlass
The challenge in finding a good screen protector isn’t so much that the product is new or that there isn’t enough choice, it’s more to do with that strangely curved screen: a gentle Y-axis curve is compounded by a slightly more pronounced X-axis curve near the top of the display, which means that a protection film needs to bend simultaneously in two directions while also sticking evenly to the screen. That’s a pretty tall order, and the two films that I’ve tried so far (one made from thin glass, and one from plastic) have both started to peel off at the top within a couple of hours, allowing debris particles to enter the gap and get stuck on the underside of the film, where they’re then pressed against the screen. Not ideal.
And the Winner is …
This morning I received a replacement film from protectionfilms24.com in Germany, having previously given them feedback on the Brotect AirGlass product which didn’t work out, and I must say that I’m very impressed so far. The replacement isn’t made from AirGlass or from any other material I’ve previously encountered as a screen protector. With the backing in place on both sides it feels kind of rubbery, and although it’s shipped in a flat envelope it retains any curve that you apply to it when you bend it with your fingers.
Brotect Flex
The backing is removed in three steps, where the first peel gives you enough of a strip to position the film on the screen, the second peel uncovers the rest of the film for application now that it’s positioned, and the third peel removes a protective layer from the front of the film to reveal a glossy finish that doesn’t feel rubbery at all, but doesn’t feel like glass either. During application you can see why the initial backing is removed in two stages, because the film itself feels very flexible and the adhesive unusually strong, which would make it tricky to fix in one go and trickier still to re-align. Doing it in stages presents no problem at all, but if I were to be picky I’d prefer the first stage to be along the base of the screen rather than at the top, because it’s that first stage which is responsible for good alignment, so using the longest edge as your datum is a no-brainer for me. I’d also provide a margin of error by making the film fractionally smaller. Right now it’s exactly the same size as the screen underneath, and if you’re a fraction of a millimetre out with the initial alignment (using the screen’s shortest edge) then that translates to a greater error at the opposite end, where you’ve now got some overhang that may or may not nag at your OCD.
Finally, the material from which this film is constructed claims to be self-healing, and after scoring the surface gently with a fingernail you can indeed watch it ‘repair’ itself over the course of several minutes. That’s a great attribute for a screen protector which can’t be made from glass because it needs to adhere to a curved display, and I congratulate the guys over at Brotect for coming up with such a cool solution.
