All fine there, Stuart.
Being the No. 1 WCA ticket holder (since way back at the start of July 1976) I have a little thing about SGs. For the smaller lighties it really doesn't matter much what is used operationally However, I endeavour to get some sound ideas in students' thinking processes on the subject. If I might be permitted to summarise the story for the thread readers -
The history goes back a long ways. In the ancient days, we had a raft of different fuel grades. The SGs sort of fell into two groups - for the lower ratings (80/87 and below) around 0.72 wasn't too bad an average and was accepted for modest quantities. Similarly, for the higher grades, around the 0.71 value was reasonably good. For larger aircraft - ie larger quantities - the fuel SG was measured, either with the ship's hydrometer or by reference to the refuellers, who knew the SG for dollar reasons.
In later years, a combination of commercial reality (which rationalised the range of grades available) and political pressures (eventually the system saw reason and started to get rid of those nasty lead compounds which did all sorts of damage to folks' health), led to our ending up with only 100LL and 100/130.
I've been running hydrometer readings on these over many years when weighing aeroplanes and the typical values are around 0.72, or a bit less, and around 0.695 to 0.7, respectively.
For the exams, of course, whatever the examiner wants is the way to go. So far as the ERSA goes, again it doesn't matter too much for small quantities as the end value is much the same. For the bigger GA twins, where the tanks can be reasonably large, one should use the actual SG or something reasonably close. Blind use of the ERSA data might, just, cause some embarrassment at the enquiry - a well-briefed barrister potentially could have a field day with SG nitpicking were the accident aircraft to have been on the (calculated) limit weight.
As a sideline, CASA (as DCA many years ago) produced a useful little monograph on weight control, the latest version of which can be downloaded from the CASA website at
www.casa.gov.au/sites/default/files/_ass...0/weight_control.pdf
I don't know who, specifically, put it together, but I presume it would have been John Fincher or, perhaps, Icko Tenenbaum - certainly the style has the feel of John's writing. I commend the document for reading by pilot students as it covers all the basic stuff on weight control. There is not much on complex loading systems, which is unfortunate but that reflects the fact that the original document was written when trimsheets and the like were the province of the airlines. GA folks, in general, had never heard of them until I started a trend to introduce them into the GA fleet in the mid-70s. Now, we even have one of Norm Overmeyer's old sheets (modified slightly by Bruce Clissold at the request of the then CASA theory examiner) used in the CASA pilot exams for loading work.