In recent years, diagnostic techniques have been investigated to detect a partial discharge(PD) in a high voltage electrical equipment. Because PD signal is very sensitive and difficult to suppress strong noises such as narrow-band radio frequency noise and random noise, the accuracy and credibility of PD measurement might be influenced by surrounding interference. Using the technique of PD detection by electromagnetic wave, we have studied the characteristics of both PD and substation-in interference signal. Also, we propose a wavelet packet transform based technique to perform a feature extraction from the interference and PD signal and a classification of the extracted features. The results show that time-frequency characteristics between PD and interference can be obviously distinguished. It is helpful for the development of the insulation diagnosis technique.