Detecting the partial discharge (PD) phenomenon in gas insulated switchgear (GIS) by using ultra-high-frequency (UHF) method is an effective diagnosis method to avoid insulation accidents. The most crucial part of UHF detecting system is ultra high frequency sensor. So a partial discharge (PD) sensor based on two-arm equiangular spiral antenna is designed and optimized in previous work. To examine the performance of the designed sensor when receiving the actual PD signal, several experiment test is performed in this research. The experimental setup including a PD model is built at the beginning. Then, the comparative test of the sensors with different impedance transformer (IT) is made, which indicates that the one with optimized IT has lower amplitude signal. And the tests by using different PD defects are also executed. It shows that the signal of the sensors can reflect the existence of PD as well as the feature of each kind of defect. In order to examine the change of the received signal when the distance varies, the experimental test are performed in the condition of the distance increasing in two directions respectively, which confirm that the change of the sensor position does not have obvious influence to the received signal. This paper further verified that the designed UHF sensor can effectively receive the PD signal and has good receiving performance to be used in PD detection.