Abstract: The intrusion detection and location system based on leaky coaxial cable sensor has been widely used in the monitoring of important areas such as national defense facilities, banks and prisons. To improve the positioning accuracy of this system, a new detection and location method of leaky coaxial cable sensor based on pulse compression technology is proposed. This method introduces the binary phase shift keying (2PSK) pulse signal modulated by the Barker code into the system as a transmitted signal, and the characteristic signal with intrusion position information can be obtained from the received signal by a series of signal processing as filtering, subtraction, coherent demodulation, sampling judgement and delay auto-correlation. The system is simulated by MATLAB and the electromagnetic simulation software CST, and an experimental system is established for test. The results of field test are in good agreement with the simulation results, which proves the validity of the new method. The positioning accuracy of the new method is about 0. 9 m, which is superior than that of the similar detection and location system which have been reported.