Zebra Technologies 8 user manual Aamva

E: Magnetic Card Encoder

AAMVA

The data stored on magnetic stripes on American driver's licenses is specified by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA).

Alpha-numeric characters on Tracks 1 and 3, numerals only on Track 2.

Track	Density	Bits per	Character	Length	LRC	Start	End	Start sentinel
	(bits per	character	parity	(characters)	parity	sentinel	sentinel	offset
	inch)							inches (mm)
1	210	7	Odd	79	Even	%	?	0.293" (7.4)
2	75	5	Odd	37	Even	;	?	0.293" (7.4)
3	210	7	Odd	79	Even	%	?	0.293" (7.4)

CUSTOM

If a custom format is desired, the ISO standard format may be used as a starting point. The standard format can then be modified by assigning different values to any or all of the density, character, and sentinel attributes. (If any of these attributes is missing, its corresponding value in the standard ISO format will be substituted.)

BINARY

The binary option allows the user to specify directly the value for each bit on the mag stripe.

In this “direct binary” mode, it is the host’s responsibility to fully populate the magnetic stripe; i.e., the hex data provided by the host must include the leading zeroes, start sentinel, data, end sentinel, LRC, and trailing zeroes. Note that the magnetic stripe is encoded from the right- hand end as viewed from the “stripe” side, with the stripe uppermost. The least significant bit of the data is encoded first.

A sufficient number of leading zeroes should be prepended to offset the start sentinel by approximately 0.3" (7.5 mm) from the right-hand end, as in the ISO format. Care should be taken to ensure that the payload data does not exceed the capacity of the tracks at their specified recording densities. (In the binary mode, out-of-range data is not recorded, and no error condition will result.)

A CR-80 size card has a nominal capacity of 252 bits per track at 75 BPI, and 708 bits at

210 BPI. These capacities equate approximately to 31 hex bytes (248 binary bits) and 88 hex bytes respectively.

JIS-II

JIS II data format is the Japanese Industrial Standard for magnetic stripe encoding. JIS-II data format is used to encode a single track on a standard ISO magnetic stripe card.

The JIS II Data Format uses a 7-bit, 128-character set; i.e., the 7-bit ASCII Table with some entries representing Japanese characters. The JIS II track is wide, covering ISO Tracks 1 and 2.

Encoding is 210 bpi, character size is 8, parity is even, the start sentinel is %, the start sentinel offset (x0.001”) is 197, and the end sentinel is ?.

P1045430-002 Zebra ZXP Series 8 Card Printer User’s Manual 205