An analytic approach is presented to evaluate the Bit Error Rate (BER) and detection range of an active RFID network using space diversity technique both at the reader and the tag receiver. The analysis is carried out with battery powered Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) type RFID tags for a UWB system with different up-link and down-link frequency ranges. Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO) configuration is used to communicate between the reader and the tag. Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) technique is used for diversity reception. BPSK, QPSK and M-ary PSK (MPSK) are considered with coherent demodulation to evaluate the BER performance. The results are numerically evaluated and it is found that with the application of the receiver diversity there are significant improvements in BER performance and the maximum detection range achieved with 5 receiving antennas is 920m at the BER of 10-08. The maximum improvement in detection range at the same BER with same number of receiving antenna is found to be 361.10m. The analyzed approach gives a clear insight regarding the interrelationship between BER, detection ranges,reader received power, number of receiving antenna, order of modulation and detection range improvement and has given improved performance in detecting tag at a comparatively longer distance in outdoor non line of sight (NLOS) environment.