The 2012 Netherlands ARDF Championship is at Havelte West.

 Formerly part of a US/NL base it is now open for public use (except the bit in the north part of the map - which is still pixellated on Google Earth)

It was a tough morning competition - some of the runners did not feel like going out for the afternoon race.

Dick Fijlstra is planner, organiser and multilingual master of ceremonies

Being a first year M50 means I have a chance of winning the "International Prize" - fastest combined time for the morning 80m and afternoon 2m competitions.

Mike Dunbar - 3rd place and first Australian

A nice trophy - but of course, not as respected as the Jan Hoek Trofee

Edwin is the Champion - The Dutch do seem to go in for orange in a big way

All the trophy winners

All the competitors - as usual M60 is the biggest class. There were more juniors at the adjacent mountain bike camp than compete in ARDF for all the countries of Western Europe

The results will be here (eventually)

and now that I have downloaded my GPS tracks - in the morning I passed within 0.4 metres of #2 having DF-ed to within 20m before it turned off - and then took 5 more minutes to find it...

0.39 metres from the Tx and I did not see the banner (it was low down to the East of a large tree trunk and I was travelling from the West)

and again for #3 in the afternoon...

4.46 metres from the Tx and I did not see the banner

The first pass - West track heading NE was 'off transmission' - the return heading SW was 'on transmission' - I got within arms length of the Tx banner and did not see it at first - I knew I was close because my Rx was constantly overloading.  I then looked down at my Yagi to make an adjustment - and there was the little flag almost touching the end of the beam.