Ultrawide bandwidth (UWB) radio, a very promising technique carrying information in very short basic pulses, has properties that make it a viable candidate for short-range wireless communications. In this paper, several short-pulse waveforms based on Gaussian genetic monocycle as well as Gaussian pulse waveform, as candidates of basic UWB pulse waveforms, are firstly proposed and investigated. Their spectrum characteristics, bit transmission rate (BTR), and bit error rate (BER) performance in AWGN channel using time hopping spread spectrum (THSS) and pulse position modulation (PPM) are simulated and evaluated. The numerical results are compared and show that the basic pulse waveforms determine the spectrum characteristics of UWB signals and have much effect on the performance of UWB radio system. The performance of UWB radio system achieved by the proposed basic pulse waveforms is much better than that of UWB radio system realized by other used basic pulse waveforms under the uniform conditions. Also,the polarity of these short basic pulses does not affect the performance of UWB radio system.