A new design of ultra‐wideband (UWB) reconfigurable pulse transmitter (PT) based on active integrated antenna (AIA) structure is introduced in this article. The presented reconfigurable AIA consists of a reconfigurable sub‐nanosecond pulse generator (PG) which is integrated with a monopole circular disk antenna. The proposed design utilizes only a single step‐recovery diode (SRD) and just a single positive‐intrinsic‐negative (PIN) diode in order to generate sub‐nanosecond switchable second/third order derivatives of Gaussian pulse. The performance of the designed PT system is investigated in both frequency domain and time domain. Low ringing level, high signal fidelity, and virtually steady group delay is achieved in the frequency band of operation. The simplicity, low cost, and good performance of the presented PT makes it a good candidate for UWB transmission with pulse shape modulation (PSM). © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:2221–2227, 2016