Wireless sensor networks supporting aggressive sampling in harsh environments (to deal with high packet loss or to provide reliable data from sensors such as 3D accelerometers and 3D gyroscopes) require transmission schemes which can achieve a relatively high throughput. Existing contention-based, low-power listening MAC protocols are not apt for these types of networks because their channel utilisation is considerably low. In this paper we propose a hybrid burst transmission scheme to achieve high throughput between static relay nodes, such as nodes deployed on a civil infrastructure (bridge or building). Our transmission scheme deals with link quality fluctuations and adaptively adjust the number of packets that can be transmitted in burst. Its essential features are relying on statistics that are obtained (1) offline and reflect the long-term characteristic of a link and (2) online and reflect the short-term link quality fluctuation. We experimentally compared our transmission scheme with two proposed state-of-the-art schemes in terms of throughput, transmission delay, packet loss, and energy consumption. We implemented all transmission schemes and integrated them into the TinyOS environment and the TelosB platform.