A novel transceiver structure is proposed to increase the achievable data rate for ultra wideband transmitted reference (UWB-TR) systems. For every N.sub.s pulse pairs during one symbol transmission, the data pulses are weighted by one of the M-ary orthogonal sequences, thus carrying additional log.sub.2 M-bit information. Furthermore, by utilizing a pair of balanced matched filters before the cross correlator, the minimum separation between the reference and data pulses is significantly reduced without causing any inter-pulse interference (IPI), which in turn reduces the minimum required frame length in order to avoid the inter-frame interference (IFI). As a result, the invented TR system can achieve higher data rates than the conventional TR system, while maintaining superior bit-error-rate (BER) performance even with lower transmit power.