A thermal transfer medium for use in mass transfer printing comprises a substrate bearing on at least part of one surface thereof a coating of an overlay material comprising polyester having a glass transition greater than 50\xb0 C. Combined measurements between transverse or tilted antennas, as well as axial antennas, are used to compensate for receiver antenna mismatch in the system. A set of M controllers is included and each controller is associated with a respective traffic way of the M adjacent traffic ways. The neck is formed with at least one neck recess therein. Also, in response to feedback from a receiver, a coding strategy for each block of the current frame is determined and coding is performed according to one or more of source coding and Wyner-Ziv coding.