Russel,
Mine is track 2, 5 bit encoding.
I'm masking the high 3 bits!

i found a "bug"...big one.
i used to stop the global interrupt (EA=0) so the interrupt function wouldn't run anymore when end sentinel was found. after i printed the readen data on the screen the EA was set back on 1.
but i found out that after EA was set on 1 the inerrupt function was called! and nrb (nr of bits) was incremented!
I'm not stopping the global interrupt anymore when i find end sentinel. all the code in the interrupt is executed only if we have not found the end sentinel yet.

void interr (void) interrupt 2
{
if (have_stop==0)
{
nr++;
[....code]
}
}

now it works pretty good! BUT when i change the card , the first reading with the second card is incorrect!

OUTPUT:
where i nr of bytes read
s have start
S have stop
nrb number of bits
char nr is number of calls of interrupt function
i:4 s:1 S:1 EA:1 nrb:0 nr:45 J1@=O
i:4 s:1 S:1 EA:1 nrb:0 nr:45 J1@=O
i:4 s:1 S:1 EA:1 nrb:0 nr:45 J1@=O
----i change card here-----
i:0 s:0 S:0 EA:1 nrb:0 nr:250 0
i:4 s:1 S:1 EA:1 nrb:0 nr:45 J1@LO
i:4 s:1 S:1 EA:1 nrb:0 nr:45 J1@LO
---- first card again ----
i:0 s:0 S:0 EA:1 nrb:4 nr:254 0
i:4 s:1 S:1 EA:1 nrb:0 nr:45 J1@=O
I don't understand why nr of calls of ISR is around 250 and no start sentinel is found!