The paper is concerned with analyzing data from an experimental antipodal laser-based chaos shift-keying communication system. Binary messages are embedded in a chaotically behaving laser wave, which is transmitted through a fiberoptic cable and are decoded at the receiver using a second laser synchronized with the emitter laser. Instrumentation in the experimental system makes it particularly interesting to be able to empirically analyze both optical noise and synchronization error as well as bit error rate. Both the noise and error are found to significantly depart in distribution from independent Gaussian. The conclusion from bit error rate results is that the antipodal laser chaos shift-keying system can offer a feasible approach to optical communication. The non-Gaussian optical noise and synchronous error results are a challenge to current theoretical modeling.