Nominal electric field at ground level is one of the important factors for the design of transmission lines. FEM meets two big challenges in electromagnetic field computation. One comes from the mesh generation, which is a big difficulty especially in complex geometry. The other is the long time calculation. So the radial basis function method is introduced to calculate the nominal electric field at the ground level of UHVDC transmission lines. Not only the definition and ideas, but also the detailed implementation procedure of radial basis function method are presented. Computer programs are developed to simulate the model and the influences of conductor configuration on nominal electric field intensity are analyzed. Examples of calculation show that the results are accorded with those available literatures, and agreed satisfactorily with analytic solutions of the coaxial cable model. The height of the polar lines and conductor inter-spacing has a remarkable influence on ground nominal electric field intensity while the sub-conductor radius and number of sub-conductors have little influence.