Layup sequence of carbon-fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) composite laminates greatly influences its properties in a composite laminate. A nondestructive technique would be very beneficial, which could be used to test the part after curing and requires less time than the optical test. Scanners were set out for different measurement modalities for acquiring ultrasonic signals as a function of in-plane azimuthal angle. Firstly, a motorized scanner was built for making transmission measurements using a pair of normal-incidence shear wave transducers to find the effect of fiber misorientation of composite laminates. Also a method for nondestructively determining the ply layup in a composite laminate is presented. The method employs a normal-incidence longitudinal ultrasound to perform C-scan of ply interfaces or full-waveform B-scan of the laminate; therefore a 2-D fast Fourier transformation had been adopted to compare the results of composite layup. And a ply-by-ply vector decomposition model has been developed, simplified, and implemented for composite laminates fabricated from unidirectional plies. It is found that high probability shows between tests and the model developed in characterizing fiber orientation of the laminates.