Tried some flight shooting today with a fixed broken bow (gave it a backing) and wanted to try if it shoots about as well as before the break.
Measuring large (well, large...) distances isn't very easy though: I don't have a detailed trimble GPS that measures up to the cm, or some other laser tools or specialized optics. I don't care about that detail either. Approximately is enough for me.
This is how I do it: I start from a known point that I can locate exactly enough on a satellite photo in google earth, and shoot into arable land or pastures with some easy points of reference like hedges, the boundary of a meadow, a big tree ... I then only need to measure with a tape measure (or when I'm lazy pace off) the nearest distance to a point of reference with a known distance from my shooting point.
The below pic shows my shooting spot right next to my house. The flight path crosses my own land mostly, but it now lands in my neighbour's meadow mostly (we do get along well enough though
)
Today my furthest shot was 4.5 m from the boundary of that meadow, distance from my shooting spot to that boundary is 240 m, so I shot some 235 m far.
Pretty easy, and no need to pace out and measure your average pace length or so.
Not displeased with the result (my furthest so far) but still far behind the real flight shooters here (especially for the primitive simple composite class <50#, despite my carbon arrows). Most of all, I need to tune arrows and work on my technique: I always see my arrows kick sideways, so they must lose a lot of speed early on.
But it's fun to make progress.
Joachim