Since the characteristic frequency is decreased in proportion to the fault distance, the characteristic frequency component may be insufficiently eliminated by a low-pass filter on a long transmission line. In order to set a standard for the cut-off frequency of the low-pass filter, this paper proposes a method for obtaining the characteristic frequencies due to line faults. The application results of the proposed method are presented for line to ground (LG) faults and line to line (LL) faults on a 345 kV 200 km overhead transmission line. The EMTP is used to generate fault signals under different fault locations and fault inception angles. By comparison between the characteristic frequencies obtained from the proposed method and the EMTP simulation, it is shown that the proposed method accurately obtains the characteristic frequency.