A traveling wave head calibration way according to Complementary Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (CEEMD) and Three-point Symmetric Differential Energy Operator (DEO3S) is proposed to address the issues of noise interference and difficulty in precise positioning in local area network wave positioning. The way filters out low-frequency bandwidth in the fault data by performing CEEMD decomposition on the signal and then uses the DEO3S algorithm to define the time of arrival of the fault wave head. The emulation results indicate the proposed way can precisely extract wave heads even in the presence of a large amount of noise interference, and has good robustness and accuracy. Compared with traditional traveling wave positioning methods, it has obvious advantages and further improves the accuracy and reliability of traveling wave positioning.