Abstract: The traditional matched field processing localization need complicated computation of replica field and has high requirement of environment parameters and acoustic field model.To overcome the shortcoming,virtual receiver technique is used for source ranging.A virtual receiver is constructed by correlating the two signals from the guide source and object source received by a vertical line array.Then,the slope of the interference striation of the virtual receiver field is estimated.Combining with the waveguide invariant β,the range of object source is determined.Through the numerical simulations and data processing collected from the experiment carried out in the South China Sea in 2004,the virtual receiver technique for broadband source ranging under the slope-bottom shallow water environment is discussed.As the frequency increases,the frequency bands should be broadened to get complete interference striation for good ranging results.In data processing,the receiver array spacing is too large to promise the orthogonality of the sampled modes as the frequency increases and ranging results become worse.