The invention discloses a relay protection tester based on an embedded system, and a checking method for the relay protection tester. The tester comprises the embedded system based on an advanced RISC machine (ARM11), a display screen, keyboard and mouse equipment, a printer, a global positioning system (GPS) positioning device and a global packet radio service (GPRS) communication interface, wherein the embedded system based on the ARM11 is connected with the display screen, the keyboard and mouse equipment, the printer, the GPS positioning device and the GPRS communication interface respectively, controls power through a universal serial bus (USB) or an Ethernet interface and is connected with a relay protection device through an RS232 interface. By the tester and the checking method, experiment current can be calculated; test current output by the relay protection tester can be controlled; after the protection device runs, running data are received by the RS232 interface of a device panel, and a result is compared with a theoretical value; and therefore, correctness of running can be judged. By using the relay protection tester, each main transformer protection checking time can be averagely shortened by 1 hour.