Abstract: A multiscale analysis method for precisely estimating the time of arrival (TOA) of radar return is proposed in this paper. Through synthetically analyzing the characteristics of echoes in different scales, our method not only can detect the radar return and measure its TOA precisely but also can cancel the multipath interferences correctly and reject noise strongly. Only a three-scale wavelet transform (WT) is needed for every receiving signal and a two-scale WT is performed on each candidate radar returns in this method. Our algorithm is more computationally efficient by using the famous Mallat algorithm. The experimental results in this paper have verified the effectiveness of our method.