Special Features of Magnetic Stripe Cards

By Allan Hall Magnetic stripe card or swipe card is a type of card that has the capability of storing small amount of data into it. These cards are an old player in the market as they are been used since years now. A magnetic stripe is a brown or black stripe that you can see when you reverse your card. The material used to make the particles depends on the use of the card and defines Coercivity of the stripe. What is coercivity !t is a measurement of how difficult it is it to encode information on the magnetic stripe. To obtain a low coercivity iron o"ide are widely used to make these particles. !n case of gaining high coercivity barium ferrite is used to make the magnetic stripe. The substrate is then coated with a uniform slurry mi"ture of these materials with resin. Another ine"pensive method of placing stripe on a card is direct coating. #ere$ the o"ide slurry is coated onto the card during the manufacturing process for the card. %ow to make these card working$ after the slurry has been coated on the substrate the particle in the slurry are aligned in order to obtain a good signal to noise ratio. This is done by passing the wet slurry through magnetic field to align the entire particle. &or low coercivity cards in which iron o"ide particles are used do not need a large magnetic field to orient them. While on the other hand$ this process is not so easy with the high coercivity materials. What makes producing high coercivity card difficult %o sooner the magnetic field is removed from the stripe the particles fall over$ so part of the skill in making a high 'uality stripe lies in designing a process that can keep those particles on their side until the slurry sets. The magnetic stripe cards can be encoded because the particles have the property to get magneti(ed in either of the pole )%orth or *outh+ direction. The information can be encoded by changing the direction. This information can be easily read back and then changed if re'uired.

Working of the magnetic stripe !t depends on the end,user usage that decides the re'uirements for the stripe- signal amplitude e"pected$ the coercivity$ the encoding method and the bit density. &irst two points to decide the type of magnetic material to use and all four points are taken into consideration to design the system. The signal amplitude is controlled by density of the particles in the resin. *ignal amplitude is important because it defines the design of the readers for the cards. Methods for encoding on the magnetic stripe .ach character is made of a number of bits and then encoded on stripe. !n order to define each bit the polarity of the magnetic particles in the stripe are changed. The most commonly used schemes are &/& and M&M that determine whether each bit is a one or a (ero. M&M encoding is more complicated than &/&. !t allows twice as much data to be encoded with the same number of flu" reversals )edges+. The choice of encoding scheme is determined by the application and the user. !f !*01!.C 2344 is necessary then &/& encoding is the choice. M&M may be a more suitable choice for applications where large amount of data needs to be encoded. #ope this reading has answered all your technical 'uestions about magnetic stripe. Article Source: http511sescardprinting.weebly.com141post1/6471681special,features,of,magnetic, stripe,cards.html