Is there such a thing..? Prefer to have option of reading in knots but not essential..Ive been looking on Google & found some good ones but they are all in America & I don't think they ship them..?
Check out Ebay, Just type in wind meter and you'll get hundreds of option. I got one for $16 and it works a treat, It was shipped from Hongkong and it arrived within a week. I've run it up against a unit that cost $200 and it reads the same, bargin as far as I'm concerned.
Yup. I looked at the one Haircut suggested from Whitworths, was mildly aghast at the price, then bought the same unit from ebay for a fraction of the price, well under your budget.
As said above ebay ftw.
Please tell me you're not going to be one of those people who stands next to the water with an anemometer in an attempt to work out what size sail to rig? You should easily be able to work out what sail to rig by empirical means 
I'm one of those people.
Using an anemometer taught me how to calibrate my "empirical means".
Saved me any number of dud rig-ups.
Once you get the hang of a place, it's a different story.
polaroid sunnies dont help as they make the whitecaps seem bigger..& dont tell me to take them off to look as I'm blind ..At least if the meter says 20kts I can add another 5 or so for out the middle & be pretty sure my 5m will be ok except for the gusts..
These are as good as you will get, they're cheap and have no batteries to run out.
www.hallwindmeter.com/gliders.php
Really it is not possible to get an accurate wind reading with a hand held wind meter. There's too much turbulence and local terrain effects. You really need something a few metres up a pole.
If you go electronic then get one of the anemometer ones, not a propellor one. At least that will eliminate a heap of the variables from holding the thing at the wrong angle.
I was going to ask what brands people have found to be good & what to avoid. We used to have a tube type with a ball back in the 80's.You placed your finger over the top I think.. I dont think it was very good..?
The tube and ball thing is called a pitot tube. The Hall is a disk. It works much better than the tube and ball one.
Next time your at coal pt, come over, pay me the $80 and I will tell you what sail to put up. I will even ask you wether you want to sail powered up or under powered.
You're not objectively measuring wind speed. Hand held meters are not accurate.
Your hand creates a zone of turbulence that effects the reading. The angle of your hand has a great effect.
Where you stand has a huge effect. Compression at the top of a dune, stagnation at the bottom. The angle of the wind to the beach. Elevation introduces wind gradient. Offshore winds go from zero to strong and back with no reliable pattern.
None of this measures the wind on the water which is what you want.
Buy a hand held meter if you want but don't fool yourself that it is giving you any more useful data than your eyes and ears.
The best and most accurate measure is to use your senses and ask people around you what is happening. You can also use your phone to hook into a number of weather stations around you and get a picture of what is happening in the area.
There are only few wind strengths to assess:
- no wind
- light wind
- moderate wind
- plenty of wind
- faaaarkin windy!!!!!!!
You can tell the first and last ones easily (sand blasting your face is a dead giveaway) and the middle ones don't matter.
It may surprise you, but I take great trouble to eliminate the confounding factors.
Holding it above my head with my hand below, not standing on a dune, checking wind direction to make sure I'm facing it directly etc. I always go to the waters edge to get the best result possible, accepting that wind may well be different further out.
Not everyone is stupid.
Have to say though, I've seen people using their eyes and ears while standing on a dune any number of times, only to have a dud rig up. Every criticism you made applies to subjective assessment too.
Intelligence always needs to be applied during any method of wind assessment.
Hooking into weather stations is pretty useless here as the readings are taken from between buildings at the top of Pt Danger, which does not translate very well to the water at Currumbin. GC seaway readings are not relevant here either.
Glare off chop makes assessing white-caps hard, and polarized sunnies add 5kts too.
Maybe I am stupid, and need help, but intelligent use of an anemometer has added greatly to my sailing pleasure when I have owned one. Mostly I use it to tell me if there is enough to get going, not which sail to use when it is clear there is good wind.
You sound like you've been windsurfing for some time, hence why i'm surprised you can't tell just by looking at the water state whether you will get going and what sail to rig. Experience is everything, over time you build up that relationship between water state, sail and board size, it's not rocket science and personally I don't believe it requires an anemometer to determine.
I guess i'm approaching this discussion from "do you need an anemometer to work out what board/sail combo to rig?" My answer would be no, yours yes on the grounds that it may remove some error factors. I guess that is that
Like Stehsegler said, I think it's best to keep it simple and minimse your gear, I run a very similar range to him only with a 5.2 instead of a 5.4, it allows plenty of overlap reducing the likely hood of a dud rig.
Yeah, I've been sailing a while, but I dropped out for 5 years or so, getting back into it in the last year.
I had a Speedwatch in the mid-90's, which taught me just how wildly inaccurate most people are when it comes to estimating wind strength.
Like the fish that got away, over-guessing is the norm.
I used the Speedwatch to "calibrate" my wind-sense for my regular spots, and when it crapped itself, I didn't really miss it. I adapted to WA without any hassle.
Here at the GC though, it's hard to get it right, for the reasons I have mentioned, so this year I bought a new anemometer, which I am finding very useful. It adds to the other stuff, it does not replace it entirely.
I also struggled to get it right a bit on Maui, as I had not sailed in such good wind since I moved here to the GC 5 years ago, and I had lost my ability to judge it.
In the context of this thread, Starboardcrazy has clearly stated that she is having trouble choosing the right sail, so her decision to invest in an anemometer is just plain smart.
Also I bet you'd want more than $80 to come in from over the other side of the lake to tell me how strong it is!.)If I lived in Wa I bet I could guage 20 - 25kts really well!
The best wind meters are the ones that have the 3 revolving cups on the top.
I have seen many others that if you do not align the hole or impeller exactly to the wind you will get an inaccurate reading.
If you must buy a wind meter then one where the rotor spins in the horizontal plane will be the go so it is not so affected by direction. They have little cups or a cylindrical rotor.
Don't get the propellor style they are all bad because they are too sensitive to local variations and the batteries go flat.
I had a Suunto and a Skywatch and they were very poor. I even sent the Suunto to the manufacturer in Switzerland for checking.
I still recommend the Hall because it is cheap and reliable with no batteries. You hold the top of the tube lightly between two fingers and this lets it align itself with the wind. You then turn it from side to side with you finger tips to get the best possible air flow to the inlet. The disk rises up the conical tube. It tends to bounce up and down between an upper and lower range and stabilise in the middle.
Having said all that, I get very cynical standing on a hang glider launch and there are a bunch of guys standing there with meters telling you it is 6-8 knots and it is clearly close to 20.
I am from the school of thought that you DO NOT need a wind meter. Even with the most accurately callibrated instrument you need to be able to associate a wind speed number with a sail/rig setup. That is always going to be the difficult part. Far better to look closely at the sea state. Face to windward with your eyes shut and concentrate on the wind pressure on your face and sound in your ears. Do this on the water also. Then associate all of those senses with your current/suitable rig setup. I (after 40 plus years of looking at the wind every day and sailing on pretty well most of those days) can accurately pick the wind strength to within a knot in the 8-12 knot range 2 knots in the 13-20 knot range and about 5 knots above 20. I actually think that in Australia we could benefit if more people learned to use the Beaufort wind scale as the actual wind speed in knots is largely irrelevant. It is the effect that a particular wind speed has on your activity that matters and this can be learned by observation.
^^^^^ That's good advice.
My gauge is:
- wind noise in my ears for light wind
- trees moving for light-moderate wind
- white caps and/or wind lines for moderate
- sand blasting my legs for strong
The only complication is that a lee shore inhibits white caps so if you see white caps in that case it's probably blowing it's tits off.
Excuse me, but I can't resist it, you could always buy a kite, the wind range is so wide that you can ride almost anything in almost any wind. 
Even if you overcome all the difficulties of calibrating the anemometer reading vs. the on the water wind (which will be a different calibration for every wind direction). Wind varies in time and space , you'll have to hold it up for more than 30 seconds. The BOM goes with 10 minutes as about the shortest useful interval to measure wind over. I'd think even a 5 second visual scan with a calibrated eyeball over a large area of water can be a better integrated estimate of the average wind than 30 seconds at the one location with the Rolls Royce of anemometers.
( We could verify this by experiment. 20 weather buoys spaced out across the local bay. How best do you estimate the instantaneous average that'll be downloaded later? I've done this in forests when measuring the wind driving experimental bushfires. It's surprising how much an individual anemometer reading varies from the group average of a number of separated anemometers - even over 10 minutes )
The BOM anemometers are going all the time, they patiently take 10 minute readings at 10 metre heights, and record the trends - for what that's worth. Down in Canberra we used to take turns at ringing the airport to see what the wind was doing.
