MagTek InSpec 9000-2005 - Manual (Page 69)

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APPENDIX B. CARD STANDARDS
In 1973, the first American National Standards Institute (ANSI) card standard was issued which
established a Reference Standard for the magnetic stripe's signal amplitude along with other card
requirements, all directed toward defining minimum parameters for card based information
interchange.
The ANSI committee responsible for Financial Transaction Card Interchange, in 1985, agreed to
accept the International Standards Organization (ISO) Card Interchange Standards as the U.S.
standards and to send an American delegation to ISO meetings to participate in future
standardization work.
In 1993, ISO completed a lengthy review of the card standards and released an updated version
of ISO 78xx series standards. In 2001 the standards were updated again. The 2001 edition is the
current set of specifications referred to in this document. The most notable change was to
remove most of the differences between ISO 7811-2, for low coercivity cards, and ISO 7811-6,
for high coercivity cards.
ISO SPECIFICATIONS
ISO 7811-2, and -6 parameters for cards that the InSpec 9000-2005 Card Tester measures are as
follows:
Note
The ISO Standard uses the terminology of Unused Encoded cards
and Returned Cards for New cards and Used cards respectively.
TRACK 1
Parameter
ISO Unused Returned
Term Card Limit Card Limit
Signal Amplitude*
Ui 126%
≥ Ui ≥ 64%
126%
≥Ui ≥ 52%
Average Bit Density Ba ± 8% ± 8%
Flux Transition Spacing Variation Bin ± 10% ± 15%
Subinterval Spacing Variation Sin ± 12% ± 20%
Adjacent Bit Cell Variation Bin+1 ± 10% ± 15%
Adjacent Subinterval Variation Sin+1 ± 12% ± 30%
Start Sentinel Position
0.293" ± 0.039" (7.44 ± 1.00 mm)
TRACK 2