The extended range of optical data communication is enabled through the
use of intermediary relay stations spaced fairly far apart. IRDA
communicatiOn, as is well known, uses very short duration optical pulses
to send data up to 1 Mbit/sec; this has the concomitant effect of
minimizing LED duty cycle and preventing excessive heating. The invention
uses a number of integrated pulses to represent a single bit instead of
utilizing a one-to-one correspondence between pulses and bits. Processing
software causes the transmitter to "stutter" or repetitively emanate the
identical pulse representing a bit of information. Sufficient photons are
thereby gathered at a receiver to reach a predetermined threshold. A
tradeoff of the data transmission frequency in this invention is that as
signal intensity drops by a factor of 100 when distance increases by a
factor of 10 yielding a distance/intensity ratio of 1/10.