Aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional ranging algorithm, this paper proposes a new ranging technique for 802.16e uplink in the frequency domain. The ranging technique eliminates the effect of the timing offset by computing the frequency difference of adjacent sub-carriers in the ranging channel, which reduces the search space from two dimensions to one dimension. When there is slot, the ranging code can be detected by adopting a threshold. The ranging technique is implemented through one-dimension search in the frequency domain, and consequently the complexity can be reduced and without losing the performance of timing estimation. The simulation results show the good ranging performance of this technique.