systems and methods are disclosed for extending the communication range of mobile communication devices . a long - range radio device is controlled by a control application on a host smartphone . the long - range radio device provides signal paths for two different radios , one employing a long - range modulation format , and another employing a high data - rate encoding such as fsk . the system provides graceful degradation in data rate as radio link distance increases and received signal strength decreases . in addition to switching between radios , variable compression and buffering are used to adapt usage to supportable data rates . voice , other audio , video , text , binary , and other data formats are supported , as also a wide range of co - resident host apps . unidirectional and bidirectional links can be used .