I've just spent half an hour plotting an entry for DIY by GPS, giving OS grid references for controls, to transfer to Autoroute so I can check it for distance.
As one of the rural idle
rich, I am in the fortunate position of having the time, and I'm certainly not complaining. But I do agree with Francis that it
can be very labour intensive, especially when proposed routes come up just a wee bit short: although I think organisers technically have the right simply to reject a too-short route, I've always tried to suggest ways of bringing a short route up to distance. But I also don't think that expecting organisers always to have the time "to thrash out any distance issues" is realistic. I had only about 90 DIYs to validate last year, and my AUK DIY mailbox had 1194 emails in the season just finished, but I know some organisers had a lot more than that.
I'm ok to do another year, until hopefully all these debate about AAA points, GPS validation, Autoroute etc are resolved, but I don't know if I'll be looking to do it for much longer than that.
And it's a great displacement activity, when I really should be decorating the bathroom.
EDIT: What Zoom has just said: John's recent improvements to the recording and validation are a huge improvement on the earlier version.