Menorca EA6

Just perusing the ARM for the Island of Menorca with a view to a future holiday. The highest point of the Island is 362m yet the highest peak is 346m with a prominence of 246m. Surely the high point should be the highest summit and as it’s an Island, it should have its own height in prominence. Sorry if this has been covered previously but I couldn’t find any info.

Are you talking about EA6/ME-001? That should be an easy fix.

73, Hans PB2T

The highest point is 346m but in the ARM (this one has a manually-tabulated summits list) has a typo for the P. So the correct P is 346m.

On several different maps of mine, the high point is “El Toro” 362m which should have a prominence of 362m.

Not really. You have to allow for Spanish trig points being placed in strange locations:
image
346m is the figure from the LIDAR model for the ground surface.

I give up. Please ignore my original post.

Are you becoming a fair weather activator in your old age? :wink:

Why? The Spanish place their trig points where they want and list the height accordingly. The OS have started giving 2 spot heights for some trig points, the ground height, and the trig height because it’s on a plinth. We use the ground height, because that’s where the activator will most likely be located. Not on the top of that building for sure.

More importantly, you found an error in the ARM by asking a reasonable question. There already is a job on the updates list for 1-nov to fix the EA6/ME region info as a result. Without you questioning a very bizarre looking set of numbers, we would not have spotted this error for some time.

Hello,
I visited Menorca some years ago, long time before becoming a SOTA fan!.
I remember to have stopped at Mt. Toro, the highest point in the island in the very centre.

On top there is a sanctuary, a bar & restaurant and a large parking place. You can see a beautiful view of the island from there.
For sure I would pay a visit and activate it if I had the chance to go there again one day.

I just saw how it looks like nowadays on google maps (street view), as the reference picture on top of the thread seems a bit out of date:

The place is plenty of free areas to deploy an antenna. I don’t see any trouble to meet the rules from that summit.

73 de Ignacio (wishing to pick a plane and go activating everywhere…)

Fecha de Construcción…: 01 de agosto de 1984

I guess that’s the date for the picture, too.

[As an aside I really enjoy the IGN vertice pictures. Sometimes you see the guy who has presumably just finished construction. Sometimes in the background there is a helicopter, or best of all, a mule.]

In some ways all the extra information we have for EA makes the job harder. When you just have a map it’s “easy”, When you have an accurate ground model and trig point elevations you have to decide which figure to use. So we have to watch out for a near-by vertice, and combined with the information sheet from IGN, including tabulated figures for what it’s stood on. decide what best reflects the ground surface. It’s quite common for these to be elevated several metres, which would potentially raise otherwise non-qualifying summits into the P150 class, or even bump up the points. But it does mean sometimes the figure we list in the tables is not exactly what you see even on the official mapping. On occasion (just one of two cases I think) this has meant that the SOTA summit is the neighbouring hill, with an apparently lower height. That requires particular confidence, with recourse to raw LIDAR point cloud data.

Anyway, thanks Steve, we’ll get the P value fixed in the ARM (or simply removed - we don’t always list it) eventually. @EA5NR

If you attempt EA6/ME-002 do note Gerald’s (MW0WML) trouble. So far as I can tell from the ground model he was close to reaching the AZ. EA6/ME-003 looks interesting. Anybody tried it yet?

You are not kidding… I got incredibly close to the AZ. I would not recommend anyone tries again from the east. I spent 90 mins trying to find a way off the track to penetrate the scrub around the summit - battered and scratched to heck I finally gave in. I suggest only a handful of vertical and horizontal metres from the AZ. But it wouldn’t have mattered as I’d have never got an antenna up anyway!
There is a track on the west side. It still doesn’t get into the AZ, but maybe the scrub might be less dense on that side… who knows!