The frequency variating source, linear generator, and switching devices lead to dynamic characteristics of the low-frequency conducted emissions within maglev on-board distribution systems. To track the time-varying feature of these disturbances, a joint time–frequency representation combined adaptive optimal kernel with compressed sensing technique is proposed in this paper. The joint representation is based on Wigner–Ville distribution, and employs adaptive optimal kernel to remove undesirable cross terms. The compressed sensing technique is introduced to deal with the tradeoff between cross-component reduction and auto-component smearing faced by kernel-function-based bilinear time–frequency representation. The time–frequency aggregation and accuracy performance of joint time–frequency representation is quantified using Rényi entropy and l1-norm. To verify its performance in disturbance signature analysis for distribution systems and primarily characterize the low-frequency conducted emissions of maglev, a maglev on-board distribution system experimental platform is employed to extract the low-frequency disturbances which pose threats to the controlling system. Comparison with Wigner–Ville distribution demonstrates the joint time–frequency representation method outperforms in tracking time-varying and transient disturbances of maglev on-board distribution systems.