Inertial field procedures and postmission adjustment methods were compared and tested in the Gimli test network in southern Manitoba. This network has excellent GPS-derived ground control and a dense network of inertial traverses that make the testing of different alternatives possible. It has also been selected as one of the two test networks of the Special Study Group 1.77 of the International Association of Geodesy on the “Utilization of Inertial Techniques for Geodesy” and this paper is a contribution to the work of this group. Of the methods compared, adjustment of filtered data gives the best results. Adjustment of smoothed traverses suffers from the effects of sytematic errors introduced to the data by the smoothing process. Neither of the field procedures tested was found to be superior to the others. However, considerable savings in measurement time and costs could be achieved by using single runs along the peripheral traverses instead of the usual double runs. Cost savings of up to 20 percent are possible with only a marginal effect on the accuracy.
Report of the special study group