Support & Subscribe
Introducing compulsory charging for access to Winterhighland is against it's principle ethos and would largely defeat the purpose of the site. However if you value Winterhighland and can afford to, perhaps you would like to consider a voluntary donation or subscription to help secure Winterhighland's continued success?
All contributions aid keeping Winterhighland independent and online (Winterhighland receives no public funding and no funding from Visit Scotland or the SSMG) - that enables us to offer independent reviews of snow conditions, manually produced five day mountain forecasts and a short term weather dicussion with a particular angle on snowsports, plus regular pix from the slopes, our own webcams and weather stations and keeping all this, plus our forum online.
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You are not logged in. If you are a registered member and would like a public thank you in the form of your forum snowflakes, please provide us with your username so we can acknowledge your contribution. Thank you.
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One off Donation
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Subscribe to Winterhighland:
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£5 a month (ongoing) |
£10 a month (for 5 months) |
Make a one off contribution of your choice.
Funds given this way will principally contribute to the ongoing provision of and expansion of our webcam and AWS network.
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If you value Winterhighland, monthly subs will help the site's continued success & development, and contribute directly to keeping us on-line.
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If you hibernate over summer, this option allows you to subscribe for winter. It also allows you to make a larger donation spread over 5 months at just £10 a month.
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Subscription to Winterhighland is entirely voluntery and you may unsubscribe at any time. A very very big thankyou for your contributions to the cause.
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More about Winterhighland
Through our snow reports, General Situation overview, mountain forecasts, Pix from the Slopes, plus maintaining and extending our webcam and AWS network Winterhighland is a full-time (and a half) operation during the late Autumn, Winter and Spring months.
Winterhighland is hosted on a robust high end dedicated server solution provided by United Hosting, this has provided rock solid stability for Winterhighland despite the fact our traffic is as unpredictable and volatile as the Scottish Weather, which means the site is completely unsuited to standard shared hosting. Thus it costs £200 per month just to keep the Winterhighland server online during winter.
Winterhighland maintains and is looking to expand our webcam coverage, using some novel and innovative combinations of technology to get cameras beyond traditional Internet connections. For example:
- £60 will buy a good quality USB auto-focus webcam.
- £150 will buy the equipment for a complete single webcam set up where we can tap into an existing net connection.
- £250 will get a webcam set up with 3 cameras to provide different views.
- £125 will provide a Pay as you Go Mobile Broadband connection and bandwidth for one camera station for winter.
- £15 will pay for a month of mobile broadband for our always on cameras.
- £5 will pay for the server for the 18 hours of work time you spent on Winterhighland last week!! :)
Uber Cams and Simple Cams
Winterhighland's existing webcam system is provided by a combination of simple single view fixed cameras and server controlled Axis Pan / Tilt / Zoom network cameras. Our fixed camera systems have been provided by recycling old outdated computer hardware and high end consumer USB web cameras. This allows several camera installations each with 2 or 3 cameras to be provided for the cost of one PTZ camera. This provides the following advantages:
- Provides redundancy. One camera goes down or breaks, you don't loose all views.
- Reduces financial risk of operating equipment in a harsh environment. No individual component is particularly expensive, compared to a high end IP camera, should any kit be damaged by extremes of temperature or water ingress due to snow (you would be amazed at where power snow can get!).
- Provides a view of immediate area in poor visibility. A zoom in view from a single camera will often provide a nice view of the inside of a cloud.
- Good for the environment with less new hardware required. A typical PC will consume more energy in it's manufacture than it's operational life span.
However, it's not possible to cover all areas in such a manor. The webcam coverage at Glencoe represents a balance between numerous individual cameras to increase redundency and use of a single PTZ camera to provide numerous views that would not otherwise be possible.
