Abstract. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an important technology to realize structural reliability evaluation, which can increase the safety and reduce the maintenance costs of engineering structures. Piezoelectric guided wave SHM technology has broad application prospects because it is sensitive to small damage and can realize multi parameter monitoring such as damage and impact. However, the reported piezoelectric guided wave SHM system is large, which is not conducive to engineering applications. In this paper, aiming at the ground rapid monitoring application of aircraft structure, a compact and portable SHM system for piezoelectric guided wave is developed. Firstly, an overall architecture of hierarchical design is proposed, and then the software and hardware design of the system is studied. The volume of the system is only 273×184×59mm3, the mass is less than 3kg, it can support 32 sensor channels, the excitation voltage amplitude can reach 140Vpp, and the maximum sampling rate can reach 60MS/s. Finally, a verification experiment is carried out to realize the accurate location of the damage of carbon fiber composite structure. The results show that the system is a high-performance portable system suitable for aircraft ground applications.