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In the first half of 1995, the Anglo-Australian Observatory is due to commission a wide field (2.1$^{\circ}$), 400-fiber, double spectrograph system (2dF) at the f/3.3 prime focus of the AAT 3.9m bi-national facility. The instrument should be able to measure $\sim$4000 galaxy redshifts (assuming a magnitude limit of $b_J \approx\ 20$) in a single dark night and is therefore ideally suited to studies of large-scale structure. We have carried out simple 3D numerical simulations to judge the relative merits of sparse surveys and contiguous surveys. We generate a survey volume and fill it randomly with particles according to a selection function which mimics a magnitude-limited survey at $b_J = 19.7$. Each of the particles is perturbed by a gaussian random field according to the dimensionless power spectrum $k^3 P(k) / 2\pi^2$ determined by Feldman, Kaiser \& Peacock (1994) from the IRAS QDOT survey. We introduce some redshift-space distortion as described by Kaiser (1987), a `thermal' component measured from pairwise velocities (Davis \& Peebles 1983), and `fingers of god' due to rich clusters at random density enhancements. Our particular concern is to understand how the window function $W^2(k)$ of the survey geometry compromises the accuracy of statistical measures [e.g., $P(k)$, $\xi(r)$, $\xi(r_\sigma,r_\pi)$] commonly used in the study of large-scale structure. We also examine the reliability of various tools (e.g. genus) for describing the topological structure within a contiguous region of the survey.
