weather station for sailboat?

I prefer to not have those all in one piece of equipment: 1. Anything at the top of the mast is likely to have problems and hard to get at. 2. A failure means you lost and may have to replace all at great expense. 3. Requires constant exposure to the elements. 4. More expensive than other options.

What I've preferred is an Oregon Scientific baramoter and temperature that gives you a bar graph for the last 24-48 hours with two hour increments. This not only tells me what direction the barometer is heading, but how easily. It does not need to be mounted outside and comes with a remote for inside and outside temps for about $100 when I got it. For wind speed and use a handheld guage, which again, does not have to be outside and exposed all the time. I bought a very reliable one for $70. So for under $200, you can have what you need with less complexities and less cost than a full blown weather station.

Maretron’s $699 Weather Station is as ambitious as Airmar’s but itself only senses wind—again ultrasonically, which means both accurately and without moving parts—plus temperature, pressure, and humidity. That’s because it uses the NMEA 2000 protocol, which is far better than 0183 at combining and distributing data. Hence a 2000-compliant display like an E-120 or Maretron’s own DSM200 (right) can easily receive GPS and heading from other sensors on the 2000 backbone and thus, like the Airmar, calculate useful information like true wind. In fact, these sensors can be best of breed, whether built by Maretron or others, and can be installed in their ideal locations onboard,

Heres the deal my friend, when you have to be protected from salt corrosion and when you need to sense wind direction, yet the boat turns, you need a better system then say a house unit. The above unti will work. see more at link below.

Orion Weather Station

The best for the money is a davis 6152 Vantage. This is First and only weather station in its class to use frequency hopping spread spectrum radio technology to transmit weather data wirelessly up to 1000' (300 m).

The fact that it's wireless make it easy to transfer if need be. Also, you can add wireless repeaters to go as far as 1.7miles. It costs $472. You can find it at http://www.pafinimarine.com/Davis-6152-Vantage-Pro...

or for a lower price of $79 you can get the Silva Tech O handheld All-in-one: altimeter, barometer, digital compass, stopwatch, time/dual time and alarm.

You can find this here http://www.pafinimarine.com/Silva-Tech-sup-4-sup-O...

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If you know their cell phone number, call it. You'd be surprised at the coverage. Secondly, if you know the marina where the boat was docked, give them a call. If you really fear, that they are over due, call your local USCG station. They will need all the information you have. However, a 50' sail boat is sea worthy , and can handle local storms pretty well. Anything short of a Hurricane. I hope you hear from them soon.