I have my wind equipment 32 feet off the ground on top of a Rohn 25G tower. This gets it above the post oak trees that surround it. From what I see on the CWOP listings with many winds unusually light and erratic, I think a lot of people do not provide proper exposure for their anemometers and there seems to be little effort going on to address this.

My wind equipment is not quite all the way up there, as I'm not climbing any higher until I re-tension the guy wires, but there it is. This anemometer survived the May 10 tornado. Unfortunately I didn't get any readings from that since I didn't have a 9V battery in it, but I would estimate it might have registered a 70 mph gust based on the damage I saw. There's also temperature gauges in a ventilated instrument housing (made by Davis), not pictured.

The area around the base of the tower has been co-opted for a chicken pen.

The wires run about 100 feet over Cat 5 cable to a 10-year old Davis Monitor II system seen here. It's strange that I never realized that the Monitor II data connection was Cat 5 until earlier this year. Years ago I remember trying RJ61 cable and finding it didn't work, but one day I plugged in an Ethernet cable and ouila. I used to use Davis Weatherlink but gave up on it as it's extremely prone to lockups, presumably since it uses the weather station to perform most of the processing (this method seems klunky and prone to transfer errors). I now use Weather Display, which simply reads the packets coming off the station and does all climatological processing right there on the computer. Weather Display is a mess as far as the user interface, but makes up for it in terms of reliability and flexibility. It even allows calibration of the values, which is important as I compared the numbers against a sling psychrometer and found that the Davis unit was reading a few degrees too high.
