Another very enjoyable pre-dawn ascent on Tenerife yesterday, activating the 1,001m Roque del Conde for 8 points plus 3 bonus. I’d been looking forward to this one ever since I realised that the attractive flat-topped peak towering over our resort is in fact a SOTA qualifier. Fantastic!
Parking was easily found in Vento, a small village just west of Arona, though stopping in Arona itself wouldn’t have added much time to the hike. For our ascent we chose the shorter of two possible paths, leading west out of Vento and then north, and this time I think we’d made the right choice. After crossing a small gorge the well made path rose through abandoned farmland and was very easy going for the first hour, with only the final 20 minutes getting steeper and more twisty, though by then it was light enough to switch off our torches.
The plateau was quite flat and expansive, and since we had it to ourselves at that time of day I secured my pole to the trig point itself - hope that’s allowed in these circles. The EFHW was soon deployed and we reeled in 24 contacts after a bit of self-spotting, including a great 20m S2S to @GM5ALX up on GM/ES-021, and a 2m S2S with the unstoppable @EA8AMT Raul on EA8/HI-001 - thanks both for allowing me to break through the crowd with my S2S calls.
The crowds arrived as soon as we’d cleared away the HF gear so we decided to take the slightly longer route back, initially leaving the plateau via the same route as earlier but soon peeling off to the right. All I can say is wow, what a descent! There’s no way I’d have been able to make it up this way in the dark, or while carrying radio gear. We needed both hands in several places to lower our way down rocky staircases, and I was lightly glad that I’d left the camera at home and stuffed all my radio gear into the rucksack last night. Very exhilarating.
This time we missed breakfast altogether and instead scoffed another sandwich & sangria brunch in a local pub - verra nice! If anybody wants a GPX track then you can download ours from this external report. Cheers!
Looks amazing! What a great summit and activation. Was great to get a S2S with you whilst I was on Ben Rinnes.
It was a little colder, 12 degC, which given the weekend was -10 degC is much better, but a fair amount of wind of the top. I did find a nice place to hunker down.
Great to catch you Alex, I’m very glad I checked for active spots as I’d never have found you otherwise. My EFHW is definitely better at transmit than receive - I wonder (tongue-in-cheek) if it’s against SOTA regs to use a WebSDR for listening?
Thanks again for picking me up! Got any plans for Sunday? I’m hoping to get up TF-007 at the same sort of time.
At times you were 51 and perfectly understandable just very faint, it was also blowing a gale with me and even with ear buds the whilstling was distracting!
Nothing planned for this week, but I will be out tomorrow morning, maybe 10:30 ish.
Hope you enjoy the rest of your trip! Looks absolutely lovely!
It’s a good question! I don’t know what Mark’s answer will be, but I can tell you why Jimmy @m0hgy and I did most of our EA8 activations similarly early.
Family holiday. We were allowed one full day out during the holiday to do SOTA. In order to do any more activating, I suggested that we head out pre-dawn, and aim to be back at the holiday accommodation mid-morning - in time to join Marianne and Liam for a leisurely breakfast ahead of whatever we were doing that day. Marianne agreed that this was perfectly reasonable.
Absorption at that latitude was making 40m and 20m nigh-on unusable in the middle part of the day. The bands were working at dawn and then for a couple of hours, but signals were fading out as the sun got higher above the horizon.
I actually love setting out pre-dawn, and getting to a summit in time for sunrise. It’s a beautiful, inspiring and exhilarating experience. The very best time of day to be climbing mountains!
No. 1 above won’t apply to Mark as he did his hikes with his wife. Regarding No. 2, our times in EA8 were closer to the sunspot minimum, so again, may not apply. No. 3 is a personal thing - so may not apply to anyone else at all!
But I liked the question so I thought I’d answer it from my perspective!
I’m glad to see @M1EYP Tom’s reasons are very similar to mine because his blog played a part in us deciding to also get out there early. Elaborating on his points:
We’re also on a family holiday; there’s 10 of us out here celebrating my father-in-law’s 80th birthday tomorrow, and getting out early gives us the best of both worlds.
My observation of the bands is similar. 40m is alive with DX when we first set up but it fades away very quickly and when I’m used to hearing inter-G back home I just get silence here in EA8. 20 and 17 stay alive for longer though.
This. We’re used to getting up early anyway (she has horses, I work for a multi-national) so the body clocks are already set, but seeing that sunrise from above the rolling clouds is just utterly magical, and by the time we get back to the hotel as others are just starting their day we feel we’ve already achieved something amazing.
I should also add that as I get older I’m less tolerant of the sun … and the selfie brigade.
Anything I can do to improve my IC-705? Lighting up a pre-amp just makes the noise louder as well so I generally give that a miss.
My thinking was that maybe my home made 49:1 isn’t as good as it could be, or the feed point isn’t sufficiently elevated, or the counterpoise isn’t long enough, or …
A/B testing is the only sure way to test, whilst on a hill. Go on a joint activation with a mate, or rig two antennas on two leads with an antenna switch.
Funnily enough, I did the latter today from 5B, with some surprising results, chasing @GM5ALX and @2M0RVZ who were activating GM summits today.
I occasionally pitch my 705 against my 7300 on the home antenna, also an EFHW but this one’s for 80m and configured as a sloper. No appreciable difference between the two rigs. Never done a joint activation yet but looking forward to the opportunity hopefully later on this trip.
Well that’s perfect for comparing the two. They should work the same/very similar for the same selection of filtering and modes. And you can compare the receive performance on lots of bands not just 80m. Beacons/broadcast stations are very useful for this.
For TX performance, program a CW CQ message such as “CQ CQ TEST DE GD5MUP TESTING ANTENNA” and send that into the EFHW you doubt and then look to see how you are being seen by RBN skimmers. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.
Ace, thanks Andy! I have a WSPR beacon running 24/7 and use a second one occasionally for A/B testing antennas, but I’ve not had reason to look into RBN before. Think I might be heading for another rabbit hole, hehe.
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