This paper is aimed at addressing the problems of high cost,complicated process and long time in traditional coal classification method and proposes a coal classification method based on electro-magnetic wave energy attenuation principle.The study includes constructing a classification experiment system composed of software radio platform,microwave antenna and data analysis server;testing a total of 150 samples of lignite,bituminous coal and anthracite coal in 3-6 GHz frequency band;extracting the energy information characteristic behind the signals;and obtaining the classification of coal powder by u-sing BP neural network prediction model.The experiment shows that the classification accuracy of trans-mission time of 0.1,0.2,0.4 and 0.8 s are 92.67%,95.26%,97.33%and 98.70%,respectively.This study provides a new reference for the application of electromagnetic wave and software radio tech-nology in coal classification.