Increasing track density in a multitrack magnetic recording system by crosstalk compensation and track following

A matrix thin film writing head and a magneto-optic readout system have been developed. They can write and read simultaneously more than 1000 parallel longitudinal tracks on a tape with high areal bit density. Such longitudinal recording systems are usually limited in track density by the intertrack interference and guiding errors in the tape transport. A simple transversal filtering over the tracks to remove intertrack interference and the behavior of a very simple and efficient optical track following servomechanism are presented. Both exploit correlations between tracks. Each track is identified by its own mean value that has been fixed at coding.