This paper presents a new approach to developing protection techniques for EHV overhead transmission lines. When a fault occurs, the fault current and voltage waveforms contain significant high frequency transient signals. The presented method is based on the detection of fault generated transient signals using wavelet analysis. The simulation study is carried out, using ATP-EMTP and wavelet analysis, which indicates that the proposed approach has the potential of developing high speed protection relays with accurate fault detection and classification.