On Sun, 5 Apr 2009 23:29:14 +0100, "Anne Burgess"
wrote:

We (gliding club) would like to acquire an anemometer. We can't
afford a full weather station, much as we would like to, and the
most important thing we need to know about is the wind speed and
direction, rather than sunshine, temperature or precipitation.

Ideally we would like something which would take readings of the
wind speed at frequent regular intervals of less than a minute,
and provide an electronic record of the average wind speed and
maximum gust in the past x minutes, where x can be altered to
suit the current conditions. It would be useful if the record
could be easily downloaded to a PC.

What type of equipment would you suggest?

One option that strikes a reasonable balance between cost and
reliability would be a basic Davis Wizard III weather station plus
data logger and PC link. This does provide an outside temperature
sensor in addition to wind speed/direction, but is primarily intended
for measuring wind data. Total cost is around the £400 mark inc VAT.

Note that this is a cabled station (ie the ansmeometer needs to be
cabled through to the console) and the small display console unit
provides live updates of current wind speed/dir every 2.25 secs.

The main Wizard station can be bought and used on its own for just
over half of the total cost, but won't give you logging and mean wind
speeds unless you also purchase the data logger unit. If you do have
the latter connected to a PC then the Summary screen of the
Weatherlink software will give you all of 1/2/10 minute mean wind
speeds as well as logging a permanent record of the data.So this
perhaps isn't quite as flexible as you're asking for, but ought to be
adequate in practice. (I don't know of any software that provides
complete flexibility in terms of setting the averaging period - it
wouldn't be difficult to write but I don't know of anything off the
shelf.)

John Dann
www.weatherstations.co.uk