I messed around with my SB-26 last night. I don't have any radio triggers, so the situation is a little different, but I did note two things. Both of which are probably useless to you
, but which I found interesting.
The first was that I could only fire the SB-26 in repeating (stroboscopic) mode if the speedlight
wasn't in [optical] slave mode.
However, if my SB-26
was in optical slave mode and set to Manual, and I set my 580EX into stroboscopic mode (we call it stroboscopic mode on the Canon side of the fence) the SB-26 would faithfully fire in sequence with the 580EX going off multiple times. I do know I can get remote stroboscopic mode if I'm using eTTL with my ST-E2 and EX speedlights.
This may be one of those things, like high-speed sync, where you need eTTL/iTTL in the speedlight or optical slaves to pull it off remotely.
I'd recommend searching the Strobist discussion group on Flickr and seeing if anybody there's come up with a solution.
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Addendum. I think I was right. Someone says
in this thread they can get repeating flash wirelessly if they use an SB-800/SB-600 and CLS with the pop-up, and someone else mentions the SB-26 optical slave.