Abstract: A magnetic data reader and method for reading magnetic data from a stripe of passenger tickets while avoiding erroneous encoding of clock data which causes a read error. A CPU controls the counter value adder to acquire a reference time by summing up values of an interval time calculated from two or more bits of clock data and averaging the added value. If the binary data change within the clock data window and the corresponding interval time exceeds the permissible range of the prescribed reference time, the CPU restarts a demodulation operation by resetting a demodulator circuit.

Abstract: A bill discriminating device includes sensor circuitry for scanning and reading all the printed patterns of a bill to be discriminated and producing discriminated data including bill scale data, the bill scale data representing the density of the printed patterns. A data storage memory stores the discriminated data including the bill scale data from the sensor circuitry. A bill scale data selector selects the bill scale data from the discriminated data and fetches the selected bill scale data from the data storage memory. A data segmentor segments the thus selected and fetched bill scale data into a plurality of blocks of data. An arithmetic unit subjects the segmented bill scale data to an arithmetic averaging process for each block of data. A reference data storage memory stores reference data for each of a plurality of predetermined reference bills.