Are there standards for magnetic stripe use?
A. Yes there are. The most commonly quoted standards are the ISO/IEC 7810, 11, 12 and 13 series of standards. These standards are written for the credit and debit card market and so include information on the embossed characters on the cards as well as the track locations and information on the magnetic stripe. ISO/IEC 7811 has six parts with parts two and six specifically about low and high coercivity magnetic stripes. These standards include information on the magnetic properties that guarantee that the stripe can be read in a magnetic stripe reader in the U.S.A. as well as in Japan. The companion to the ISO/IEC 7811 series of standard is ISO/IEC 10 373. This document details the test methods for the ISO/IEC 7811 series of standards. AIM released their Technical Specification “Effective Magnetic Parameters of Magnetic Stripes on Media” in June 1996. This document details a collection of parameters that can be used to completely define a magnetic stripe and compare it with another str
