INCREASING TRACK DENSITY IN A MULTITRACK MAGNETIC RECORDING-SYSTEM BYCROSSTALK COMPENSATION AND TRACK FOLLOWING

A matrix thin film writing head and a magnetooptic 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. S uch longitudinal recording systems are usually limited in track densit y by the in-tertrack interference and guiding errors in the tape trans port. A simple transversal filtering over the tracks to remove intertr ack interference and the behavior of a very simple and efficient optic al track following servomechanism are presented. Both exploit correlat ions between tracks. Each track is identified by its own mean value th at has been fixed at coding.