The key technology of the traveling wave fault location of transmission line is to capture the fault traveling wave signal arrival time more accuracy and determine the traveling wave velocity. The Wavelet Transform (Wavelet Transform, WT) is the traditional algorithm adopted to the identify the wave head, and the Hilbert - Huang Transform (Hilbert-Huang Transform, HHT) as a new and powerful analysis tool is worth further researching, which is used for the analysis of non-stationary and nonlinear signal. Basing on the theory of three-ended traveling wave fault location, the transmission line simulation model of the simulink is established in the paper,by means of Haar, db4 wavelet and HHT analysis, the fault location results show that HHT can effectively improve the precision of fault location, overcoming the shortcomings that the wavelet transform need to choose the wavelet function and the decomposition scales.