In this paper, the performance of adaptive equalization and turbo product coding is investigated for pulse-based UWB communications in short-range indoor environments. The sensitivity of adaptive LMS linear and nonlinear (decision-feedback) equalizers with respect to the number of training symbols and number of taps is considered. To reduce the error performance variation with respect to changing channel conditions, a turbo product code (TPC) with two component (31,26,3) Hamming codes is proposed. We report simulation results showing that channel coding not only improves error performance, but also reduces significantly the sensitivity of UWB systems in short-range indoor wireless communications.