An ultra-wideband transceiver that includes a selection mechanism for selecting an internal or an external pulse repetition frequency generator, the output of which is used in the generation of very short duration UWB RF pulses. A detection mechanism is electrically isolated from the oscillator but shares access to a single port that is used for both transmission and reception (e.g. a physical layer transmit/receiver port) of RF signals. The detection mechanism detects changes in the received signal by comparing the received signal to a reference, amplifying these changes, removing high frequency noise and sending the resulting signal for subsequent signal processing, for example a digital signal processing system.