Ranging using ultrasonic waves is applied in several areas such as robotics, industry and medicine. Great efforts have been taken in research to improve the precision of this system. These efforts developed different techniques to attain more accurate result. To evaluate the performance of these techniques a flexible platform is needed to implement them and then to analyze and compare their performances. In this framework a novel design and implementation of a general purpose ultrasonic ranging system is presented. This system is employed to implement three different methods they are; simple threshold, double threshold, and correlation detection. Then we analyze statistically their experimental results. The performance of these techniques is compared in terms of the change of bias, standard deviation, and total error as a function of range. The experimental results exhibit the flexibility and simplicity of the proposed system by which it can be easily adapted to support other similar applications.